Chris

Learnings:

1. Clegg can't deny something outright in the Commons unless he is damned sure it doesn't exist. Misleading the House is a serious matter; his failure to provide an outright denial should be seen in that context, and not as obfuscation or 'difficulty'. Clegg is not running HMG's 'No' operation, Gideon and the ginger freckled one are. His failure to utterly deny is more likely a sign that he was ambushed.

2. Angus Robertson, on the other hand, knows that you can stand up on the opposition benches and say, with very few caveats, anything you like, and he knows that once it is said, newspapers can quote it at will, even if there is absolutely no evidence for it, thanks to the absolute privilege MPs enjoy when speaking in the chamber, and the corresponding protection from action newspapers have when reporting it.

3. Ipsos-MORI has no employee called Kelly Brown. Whoever she is, when she writes to the papers claiming her 'employer' has done a poll and the government is suppressing it, she's talking out of her hat. Assuming she has one.

The Nat's black ops department has been in overdrive for months now. It stretches from the use of Panelbase (which is known to have had its sample panel corrupted) in the production of badly constructed polls which overstate Yes support in comparison to all other polls to the recent, sudden upswing in the number of women apparently taking to Facebook to praise Alex Salmond, the SNP and the Yes camp, none of which are known for their attractiveness to female voters.

All the polling evidence that has been published and scrutinized over the past six months shows that support for Yes, at its most optimistic, has been unable to get past the 45% barrier, which as it happens is the maximum level of support garnered by the SNP in the 2011 Holyrood elections. Even the polls conducted for the Nats by Panelbase have never shown a Yes majority, or a trajectory likely to indicate one in future.