In the end the people of Scotland embraced, justified and deserved their Day of Destiny. The votes for a parliament with tax-raising powers were overwhelming - more than enough to shatter any lingering opposition in the House of Commons and the Lords to the legislation effecting the clearly settled will of the people.

If they didn't quite dance in the streets, the people had nonetheless spoken with quiet and steely determination. A profound sense of change swept the country yesterday, as the citizens of Edinburgh awoke to ponder the bright prospects for the capital as a seat of real government.

Speculation immediately centred on Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar as the-man-most likely to emerge as First Minister, when the Scottish government assumes command in 2000. For all the tensions doubtless to come, Westminster politicians shared the general sense of history - with Mr Blair travelling to Edinburgh to share in Mr Dewar's personal triumph. Emboldened by the Scottish result, the Prime Minister journeyed on to Cardiff, telling the Welsh it was their turn next.

The strategy of holding the Welsh referendum a week after Scotland's never seemed more sensible. And while the issues are of lesser magnitude, and the vote may be a great deal less predictable, the Labour government has won a massive boost for its plans to re-draw the constitutional map of Britain.

That said, much else seemed unchanged on the morning after Scotland made history. The tills rang loud in Marks and Spencers and the British Home Stores. The Union Jack still flew outside the Balmoral Hotel and on assorted public buildings. We were left not so much examining the wastelands of a once United Kingdom, but of a once, and only recently, mighty Conservative Party.

On Wednesday, April 30th, John Major launched one final, desperate bid to save himself and his party from disaster. Conservative officials fed journalists details of the plan the night before, strictly for guidance and not for disclosure before the event. The then prime minister would make a whirlwind tour of the component parts of the United Kingdom in a clarion call for the rejection of a Labour Party which, he claimed, threatened its disintegration.

It obviously struck some strategists as a clever, potentially powerful piece of symbolism. More than that, it betokened Mr Major's belief that his opposition to devolution had helped him defy the electoral odds in 1992.

Many commentators thought Mr Major had an exaggerated sense of this, even in 1992. And as he returned to London that April night to issue a final rallying cry his attempt to repeat history looked pathetic and forlorn. In the intervening years Mr Blair had dispelled the fear of Labour which did for Neil Kinnock. More crucially, the Tories had blown the people's trust.

For many, the defeat of Michael Portillo will endure as the defining moment of that memorable election night on May 1st. But nowhere was the Tory rout more vehemently inflicted than in Scotland, where voters declined to return a single Conservative MP. The "settled will" of the Scots seemed clear and beyond doubt.

However, just as Mr Blair had incurred debts to the Scottish Labour Party - promising to complete John Smith's unfinished business in the early stages of the race to succeed him - so he had complicated the Scottish picture by his necessary wooing of Middle England.

Not knowing the size of majority that would be his, Mr Blair decided on an early referendum as a way of defusing Tory opposition in parliament. But fearing the vocal Tory campaign against the "Tartan Tax" could undermine his promise of fiscal rectitude, he determined Scots would be asked separately to decide if the Scottish parliament should have tax-varying powers. Scottish Labour was apoplectic - the more so when he compounded the offence by appearing to liken the proposed parliament to a parish council, affirming (perfectly correctly) that sovereignty would remain with him as a Westminster MP.

The suspicion held (and holds in some quarters) that Mr Blair was never much enamoured of devolution and that he would have been privately relieved by a "Yes, No" vote from Scotland - Yes to an assembly, No to giving it tax-raising powers. So there was more than a touch of irony when the Prime Minister told Scots last Monday to have confidence in themselves.

Those suspicions certainly informed the charge levelled by Baroness Thatcher that the government's approach to the constitution was both cynical and shallow. And many harbour deep and genuine doubts about the end result of Mr Blair's programme to disperse and decentralise power.

It remains to be seen if the English will tolerate higher per capita spending in Scotland once they realise the degree of autonomy to be enjoyed by the politicians in Edinburgh. They may well resolve the West Lothian Question - not, as Mr Blair hopes, by demanding devolution for the English regions - but by preventing Scottish MPs voting on purely English concerns at Westminster.

But these are now problems to be resolved and worked through, rather than for high-minded and abstract debate. The die is cast. And the Conservative Party in its heart knows that - even as it mocks the imminent collapse of the temporary marriage between Labour and the Scottish Nationalists - it will have to contemplate a partnership of its own with Labour, to ensure that the new arrangements work in a manner beneficial to the continuance of the Union.

It was no accident that many of Scotland's brightest and best Tories took little or no part in the referendum campaign. Some of them will be seeking seats in the Edinburgh parliament, glad of the lifeline presented as they seek to rebuild their shattered electoral base. Mr William Hague can hardly junk his party's principled objections ahead of next Thursday's referendum in Wales. But whatever the result there, the Tories will have to accommodate themselves to the new, and dramatically changed, realities of British political life.

During their years of ascendancy Tories liked to boast of the essential pragmatism at the heart of their ruthless, election-winning machine. Mr Blair and the people of Scotland have called upon them to return to that pragmatism - and they have issued a similar challenge, too, to the unionists in Northern Ireland.

Dublin dislikes talk of any relationship between Mr Blair's plans for institutional reform in Britain and the situation in the North. However, at the very least, that dominant unionist tendency to revere the Palace of Westminster, its practices, procedures and arcane rituals, is surely challenged. After years of sterile debate between "devolutionists" and "integrationists" Mr Blair's determination to distribute power will surely halt their flight from it. "The Status Quo," as Dr Mowlam would put it, seems less and less an option!