Nicola Sturgeon has said the pro-independence side was taken "by surprise" when David Cameron agreed to the independence referendum and thought it had a "pretty low" chance of winning at the start of the campaign. The former First Minister made the comments as she was reflecting on the vote during a discussion on the Political Currency Podcast hosted by former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne and former Labour Cabinet minister and shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. She also noted that "we thought that if we got the campaign right we could give ourselves a fighting chance.
" Talking about the political context in which the demand for the referendum was made to the UK government by her predecessor Alex Salmond, which followed the SNP winning a majority in Holyrood in 2011, she said: "Alex was a gambler...
he never made any secret of that. So he was always weighing the odds. He was always trying to game in his own mind what gave us the best possibility of coming out of this process with something that was a victory.
" READ MORE: University leaders have added £49m to their budget ask 'Tobacco restriction plans will save lives in Scotland' Thousands of Scots waiting more than an hour for NHS triage Pressed on whether she thought the independence side would win, she replied: "[We thought] we've got to fashion a way of becoming the winners. So at that point, what did we think about our prospects of success? We thought, if you looked at them rationally, they were pretty low, pretty sl.
