Willie Rennie has gone to town on the Better Together pro-UK campaign in an interview for the Sunday Herald. He described it as “dark” and “secretive.”

Labour had a dark campaigning style. It was very secretive. Everything would be last minute. You would never be told much about what was going on until it happened. We all suffered. The Tories and ourselves suffered more, but some in Labour were out of the loop as well.”

You mean an inner circle ran everything? “Yes. It was Blair [McDougall, campaign director] and Rob [Shorthouse, communications director]. People like that were making decisions and had this addiction to secrecy. It was a fear of the other side finding out what we were planning.

It was quite shambolic in its development. Internal comms was poor. You just weren’t told about plans. Things were kept back. The board were frustrated at times as well.

Anyone thinking of developing a cross party referendum campaign at some point in the future should take heed of his words:

It was a clash of three different political parties. We all had very different visions for the union, so inevitably the common element was what we were against, which was independence.

So to get a consensus, you were focusing on the negative. You couldn’t do a positive vision.

He contrasted it with the losing but more grassroots Yes campaign:

The “top-down, politically led” nature of Better Together meant it missed a huge opportunity to grow a community-led campaign of the kind Yes Scotland fostered, says Rennie.

We were talking a different language. We were making a case – they had a cause. That changed the whole nature of it. And when they [Yes] started occupying the squares and towns and it had that East European feel, it made us gulp. You could feel it moving.

He also repeated comments he made at the time about those awful Alex Salmond pickpocket posters, describing the Tory tactics as “despicable.”

I thought Cameron was despicable. The way that, within a matter of months of having helped us save the United Kingdom, he was prepared to put his party before his country.

The Alex Salmond pickpocket [election ad] was despicable, just despicable. For somebody who calls himself first and foremost a Unionist, you don’t behave like that.

You can read the whole interview here.

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