Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has implied that the Queen should refuse to be drawn into a future vote on Scottish independence, following David Cameron’s admission that he asked the monarch to intervene in 2014.
During first minister’s questions on Thursday, Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Green party, asked Sturgeon whether the UK government could be trusted not to again seek the Queen’s help in a second independence referendum. Sturgeon replied that Scotland’s future “should always be a matter for the Scottish people”, and said the revelations from Cameron “say more about him than anybody else”.
Cameron confirmed in a BBC interview that he had asked the royal household whether the Queen could “raise an eyebrow” about independence after a YouGov poll put support for leaving the UK at 52% days before the 2014 referendum. The monarch is supposed to be impartial, but on the Sunday before the vote she told a well-wisher: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”
A source in the royal household told the BBC there was displeasure at Buckingham Palace over Cameron’s disclosures, saying “it serves no-one’s interests” for conversations between a prime minister and the Queen to be made public. Cameron later admitted he may have said too much but said he was trying to be honest about the frustrations of the campaign.
Sturgeon concluded that anti-independence parties “know they do not have the arguments against independence and they know that when Scotland is given the right to choose, Scotland this time will choose to become independent.”
