Good year, bad year

The Liberal Democrat Borders MP was dumbstruck when he was sacked as Scottish Secretary in October, a week shy of the anniversary of the Edinburgh Agreement he negotiated with SNP Deputy First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, which put the referendum on a legal footing.

But since he was summarily replaced by his LibDem colleague Alistair Carmichael, Moore's stock has climbed inexorably, just as "bruiser" Carmichael's has headed for junk bond status thanks to a series of televised pummellings.

Also emerging with extra credit is Carmichael's on-screen nemesis, the Deputy First Minister. Sturgeon was behind the SNP's promise to scrap the bedroom tax after a Yes vote, wiped the floor with all comers in television debates, and compiled November's White Paper on independence. The next 12 months will determine whether she can become First Minister as well.

The man she metaphorically hospitalised in debate, meanwhile, is one of the clear losers.Carmichael may have been a behind-the-scenes whizz at Westminster as LibDem chief whip, but the Orkney & Shetland MP hasn't yet cut it in the spotlight as Scottish Secretary, where he's been a hesitant and flustered debater.

In his favour is the fact that he is effectively unsackable - his removal would cause a meltdown in the No camp - but he can't just rely on that. Sturgeon was able to be so brutal in her television debate because they had no relationship. She later admitted she couldn't have been equally ferocious with Moore as they got on so well; Carmichael had better make friends fast.

Also in the firing line - from erstwhile friend and foe alike - has been Alistair Darling. The ex-chancellor of the exchequer and chairman of Better Together was recently denounced by anonymous Conservative sources as "comatose" and a "dreary figurehead". Downing Street later rallied behind him, but by then the damage was done.

The motivation for the attack remains obscure. It may have been Tory defeatists blaming him early for a Yes vote to spare David Cameron, or Tories anxious to trash Darling so he won't replace Ed Balls as shadow chancellor before the General Election.

Whatever the reason, the episode prompted a re-examination of Darling's efforts, and many commentators found him wanting, the £170,000 he earned last year from corporate speeches adding to the impression of a part-time boss.

However, Darling can still make people sit up. The standing ovation he received from the Scottish Tory conference in the spring may have mortified him, but it reflected his audience's gratitude for a clear, hard-headed analysis of the SNP's weak spots. And while his instant rebuttal to the White Paper was too scripted to work, the next day he delivered a master class in deconstructing the blueprint's lack of financial detail. He ends 2013 bruised but not seriously wounded.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Blair Jenkins, the chief executive of Yes Scotland, earned points for doggedness in the face of lacklustre polls, but lost credibility in August with his reaction to the hacking of a colleague's email.

In an extraordinary rant, he said "dark forces" were engaged in "sustained criminal and sinister activity" against democracy, ie Yes Scotland.

The Sunday Herald later revealed that the hacker claimed they had taken took over the email account to expose lax security in the campaign, which they claimed to support.

Jenkins's counterpart at Better Together, Blair McDougall, kept the low profile befitting of a backroom Labour fixer. However, Better Together suffered a huge own-goal when a staffer let slip that their ironic name for themselves was "Project Fear".

Within hours of the Sunday Herald revealing the phrase back in June, it exploded on social media and was adopted by the SNP and Yes Scotland. It looks set to haunt Better Together all the way to polling day.

As to Alex Salmond, like Michael Moore, the First Minister straddles both the winner and loser classes. On the polls, he can take comfort from the Yes camp for not going backwards despite endless attacks from Westminster and the Unionists, and from an apparent rise in undecided voters - a crucial step in making converts to independence.

But the pace of change is agonisingly slow. November's White Paper was supposed to be a game-changer, but it seems to have had almost no impact on people's voting intentions.

Arguably the biggest losers of the year are the various pro-Union parties. Not because they've already lost the vote - the polls still predict they'll win - but because they missed the chance to lock down the result, and left Salmond enough room to defeat them.

Despite complaining bitterly about the length of the referendum campaign, Labour, the LibDems and Tories have failed to use that time to come up with a common position on more powers for Holyrood in the event of a No vote, which is what most voters say they actually want. If the Unionists had worked together on a plan, they could have settled this by now.

The LibDems, to be fair, did act, with a commission from Sir Menzies Campbell and Scottish leader Willie Rennie urging the other parties to join him for talks on an alternative prospectus.

But Labour and in particular the Tories have been woeful, dragging their feet on their respective, half-hearted devo commissions. Labour's took six months to meet, but at least produced interim ideas on tax devolution last spring, while the Conservatives are still toiling on an overdue interim report.

By the time all three finally set out their stalls it will be too late to convince voters they agree on anything, far less a shared appetite for radically enhanced devolution. And that leaves Salmond still playing one of his strongest cards - that a No vote means at best stagnation, and probably more cuts and decline.