POLITICS is full of what-ifs.

Alex Salmond, nursing a knee injury from a round of golf, reflected on the political game of his life and that, if a handful of things had swung for rather than against him last September, then Scotland would now be just six months from being a fully independent nation and he would have been its first Prime Minister.

Amid all the ups and downs of the referendum campaign, the former SNP leader seized on one incident, which he felt was the catalyst to saving the 300-year-old Union and which prevented his lifelong dream from being realised.

On September 7, YouGov published an opinion poll that spilled the tea in Whitehall; for the first time it put the Yes Camp in the lead by 51 points to 49. A 22-point deficit had been wiped out in just one month.

“Sheer panic” gripped the corridors of power in London, leading to a renewed frenzy of scaremongering from the Treasury’s dedicated referendum unit, the abandonment of PMQs by Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband to travel north and, most crucially, the announcement of the Vow on giving Holyrood more powers.

But what if that poll had been published not on September 7 but on September 14, just four days before polling day; would the Yes camp have won?

“Yes,” declared Mr Salmond confidently. “The momentum would have carried us through. When you get in the last few days of an election or a referendum, then momentum is everything. The ability to change the climate is very limited but 10 days out.”

The ex-First Minister insisted if the poll had been published with just days to go before the referendum vote, then the Coalition Government would simply not have had the time to pull out all the stops.

“There wouldn’t have been time to assemble the company, there wouldn’t have been time to go over the Vow,” he argued, noting: “I always thought we could win but for us to win we had to have everything fitting into place in the right order; many things did but not everything did. It was a poll too soon.”

The panic, Mr Salmond noted, also led to another flashpoint, which continues to reverberate in terms of the SNP Government’s relationship with the BBC.

The “nefarious activities” of the Treasury, most notably the “re-intensification of the scaremongering campaign”, also led to pressure on Scotland’s banks and businesses.

“At Downing Street on the Monday, 10 days out, was a meeting of company heads summoned to the rose garden to persuade them(to back a No vote). I knew within hours because the ones who were not going to play ball phoned to tell me. But plenty did of course. There was a renewed scaremongering effort plus the soft, easy option.”

This was the Vow, which promised Scottish voters extensive new powers for Holyrood, and which the MP for Gordon conceded was “technically, a very clever exercise” as it was focused on swing voters. They “totally understandably, were concerned about a major step and it offered a chance to secure everything you want and de-risk the proposition”.

At this point, Mr Salmond unexpectedly produced a piece of paper from his briefcase and said it was a document that had “never been seen before”; it was a copy of the email from the Treasury to the BBC, claiming Royal Bank of Scotland was thinking of “evacuating the country” in the event of a Yes vote.

The SNP grandee believes this was factually inaccurate but was all part of Mr Cameron’s dirty tricks exercise and led to his public spat with Nick Robinson, the BBC’s former political editor.

“What irritated me was I couldn’t get Nick onto what I saw as the story; that is, the briefing of market-sensitive information…before a board meeting had finished. To me, that was an amazingly important story,” insisted Mr Salmond.

“I wrote to Jeremy Heywood(the Cabinet Secretary) and asked what’s been going on and I just got a blanket response. The reason they didn’t have an inquiry was because they would have found out what had actually happened.”

Apart, of course, from the result, the lowest point of the campaign for Mr Salmond was his first TV head-to-head with Alistair Darling, who led the No campaign.

“I was disappointed and annoyed at myself. I was stupid on timing. I had under-estimated the extent of the hands-on commitment to the Commonwealth Games…The first debate was the day after the Games. That was foolish of me. I was annoyed about the tactics I took so I was determined to settle it in the second debate; which is what we did.”

The ex-SNP chief disagreed with Jim Sillars, the former MP and deputy leader of the party, who has suggested that the Yes camp should have promoted Scotland having its own currency rather than joining a currency union.

“What was mattering in the last month of the campaign was not the currency issue, which had basically been done to death and settled absolutely in the second debate; what the issue was was other issues like the various companies and the nefarious activities of the Treasury in saying the banks were all leaving the country and the rest of it, and the Vow; that's what mattered.”

A year on and the seasoned campaigner admitted he was still “grievously disappointed” by the No victory but asked: “Should we cry in our soup because we lost the referendum or should we say well, listen, we started with 30 per cent, you gave - as the Americans would say - the Establishment one helluva fright and you finished with 45 per cent; is that success or failure?

“Since then you've wiped the floor with the Unionist parties in the General Election and things are set fair for a further transformative change of Scotland.”

Next week, the paperback version of Mr Salmond’s book about the campaign, The Dream Shall Never Die, is published. Despite the bruises, it is clear wee ‘Eck is still up for the fight.

“I've always been a half glass full person...and I'm pretty optimistic."