Cameron: a willing actor in Salmond's drama?

Just a brief supplementary observation on top of what one reader described as this afternoon's whistle-stop tour through the main implications of the draft independence referendum Order in Council, published by Scottish and Westminster governments today.  Looking at the official snaps taken, and the footage being broadcast as I write into homes the length and breadth of Scotland, one can't help but be struck by how far and how successfully Salmond has been able to cast the Prime Minister in Alex's preferred role, at the end of the first act of this constitutional drama.  

A photograph does not an independent nation-state make, but they project important images, make subtle connections, inflect credibility, and arguably do much more work in making institutions credible and imaginable than most folk would be willing to admit. Today's stage managed little encounter is not an isolated example. Salmond has assiduously cultivated opportunities to project an image of a statesmanlike First Minister, and of a Scottish government generally,  "comfortable on the world stage".  Recall his early publicity coup in 2009, with a (no doubt brief) meeting with the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. 

At the time, the more grinchly Scottish political contingent, predictably, pooh-poohed this for a publicity stunt.  The First Minister's critics saw in this sort of escapade evidence primarily of Salmond's bombast and pomposity, ignoring the boundaries of his office, brashly shoving himself to the fore and generally intervening where his interventions aren't called for.

These criticisms arguably miss the broader significance of these little vignettes, and the images which circulate from them. Salmond is, by soft degrees, subduing Scots to the idea that our politicians might sit unembarrassedly in international councils and negotiations, might not make a pig's ear of it, or otherwise show us all up by being bungling lackwits.  He has the Scottish cringe in his sights. It is a modest, but critical, contribution to encouraging - and concretising on screen - the idea of Scottish statehood is not only conceivable, but practical and achievable.  That it is literally imaginable.  Surveying just a few taken in Edinburgh today shows how far you can gain this sort of international frisson even within domestic UK politics.  What is surprising, however, and what might leave many Tories disgruntled, is just how far Cameron has been willing to go along with maestro Salmond's performance.

 

Cameron emerges from a spanking black car. The pair enjoy a formal, photographed meeting on the steps in front of the forbidding St Andrew's House. Consensus between the Westminster and Holyrood governments is not simply reached, unpretentiously confirmed by an email or a phone call, and announced in a speech or bulletin, but instead the Scottish government stage a dramatic encounter between the two leaders, a "signing ceremony" as the BBC's Daily Politics today had it. There is a surfeit of handshakes, and plenty of photos taken.  The echo of a treaty - reached, lest we forget, by co-equal nation states - is surely intentional and striking. 

The parallel is reinforced by several touches. Everything was calculated to emphasise the equality of the participants. Not a Prime Minister meeting a subordinate and parochial leader, but the visit paid by one a head of government to another, meeting and negotiating on more or less equal terms.  The ritual simultaneous co-signature, as both men put their names to an agreed text (the only aspect of the drama which arguably lacked elegance. The impersonal font, and A4 printed page, is hardly a new Declaration of Arbroath in vellum and sealing-wax). Even christening it the Edinburgh Agreement, its capitalisation a canny and conscious rhetorical move, suggests the sort of symbolism the nationalists are striving to promote.

And by gum, they succeeded. Cameron has proved an amazingly pliant co-participant.  You can't imagine Gordon Brown being so readily willing to hop to Salmond's jig in this way, partly, presumably, because our erstwhile Prime Minister felt more confident with his own Scottish credentials, and accordingly, couldn't be dragooned into this dance in the same way as Cameron was today.  Alan Trench has a nice phrase in a splendidly good post today on the detail and history of the section 30 negotiations.  The SNP, he says...

"... has won a symbolic game, by ensuring that Salmond only met Cameron, and leaving more junior ministers in each government to deal with the details."

The unsubtle point of all of this, is that events like today do more than simply mark agreement and resolve political controversy between the two governments in a functional, practical way.  They represent are an opportunity to project an image of what Scottish diplomacy might look and feel like after independence, with the English Prime Minister received in a neighbourly and constructive way.  As Alex Massie observes:

@peatworrier Why, it's almost as though some folk would have you believe Cameron was visiting a foreign country... Crivvens!
— alexmassie (@alexmassie) October 15, 2012

Exit Cameron, wet.