SCOTLAND:"Sé lá mór seo - it's a big day, as they say in Gaelic. Because while on one level, [ this] is simply the launch of a White Paper on Scotland's future, in truth it is so much more than that. Because [ it] is also the start of the next, and most dynamic, phase of Scottish constitutional reform."
Fortune, it is said, favours the brave. And Alex Salmond is a bold man. As his many and assorted political opponents would have it, the leader of the Scottish National Party also suffers no shortage of cheek.
Mr Salmond ousted Jack McConnell to become first minister after beating Labour with a bare one-seat majority in the Holyrood elections last May.
After two terms of uninspiring Labour-Liberal Democrat leadership, the people were hungry for something new. Yet the prospects of stable government under a Nationalist-Liberal Democrat alternative were dashed when Mr Salmond's powersharing partners of choice opted for the backbenches.
The departing Mr McConnell cited the clear majority for the various unionist parties and vainly questioned Mr Salmond's mandate even to form a minority administration. Faced with governing by consensus, issue by issue on the floor of the Scottish parliament, there were many people ready to predict Mr Salmond's brave new Celtic dawn would be short lived.
So there was no surprise when the Labour leadership launched a pre-emptive strike ahead of yesterday's White Paper, accusing Mr Salmond of "grandstanding" on issues of no interest to the Scottish people and squandering their money in pursuit of a referendum asking a question to which they already knew the answer.
Yet here he is, barely 100 days in office, setting the political agenda and leading a debate carefully crafted to embrace the whole range of options - from the status quo to greater autonomy for the Scottish parliament, through federalism to full independence - making it impossible for the other parties to ignore.
Not important either, it would appear, are the obvious contradictions in a public mood that sees Mr Salmond's approval ratings soar even while support for separation again appears to fall. "The force is with him at the moment," as one former Labour voter told me yesterday.
"Even if they don't ultimately want to go as far as independence, people were just fed up with the other crowd and I think they're prepared to see where this goes."
Such sentiments might, in part, explain the ease with which Mr Salmond yesterday declared that "the tectonic plates of Scottish politics" already shifted even in advance of his launch of his government's White Paper, Choosing Scotland's Future, a National Conversation - Independence and Responsibility in the Modern World.
"This debate - one focused on the next stage of self-government - demands the attention of every Scot," Mr Salmond told reporters at the press launch at Napier University. "It does so not because Scotland is entirely united on the best option for further constitutional change, but rather because we are now united in the belief that no change is no longer an option."
Using the language once used to justify Labour's devolution settlement, the first minister declared: "Just as the settled will of the Scottish people was once for the creation of a parliament, so now the settled will is for that parliament to grow in influence and authority."
Mr Salmond believes this challenge will intensify the pressure on the Liberal Democrats who - while insisting they will "sup with a long spoon" in Mr Salmond's debate - favour greater autonomy for the Scottish parliament within the union. The challenge also came with a warning from the first minister that - while some additional powers, perhaps involving control of broadcasting or Scottish elections, could come about by consensus between the parties - any devolution of fiscal responsibility, for example, would require a referendum.
"You have to be in the business of a referendum when you are for a larger shift of power," Mr Salmond insisted. In a minority at Holyrood, the first minister accepted he would only get his referendum - and thus the issue of independence on a ballot paper - if he could secure majority participation.
However, he also divined evidence of a move toward such participation even in Monday's Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democratic attack on the White Paper's focus on what the unionist parties called a "narrow and failed agenda".
Mr Salmond said: "It would be a simple matter for me to crow about how, even before this [ White Paper] was published, the tectonic plates of Scottish politics had shifted. There is now no substantive debate about whether there should be change - only what change there should be."
This assertion was based on the apparent willingness of Labour and the Conservatives - while trenchantly opposed to independence - to join a "debate" about how devolution might be developed. As the Daily Telegraph'sveteran correspondent Alan Cochrane reported, it appeared Monday's tough stance by the leaders of the unionist parties might only postpone their joining Mr Salmond's proposed national conversation.
"Now or later, that's right up the first minister's street. He will take independence any way he can get it. He'd prefer it in one fell swoop but if it has to come in incremental stages, bit by bit, with a new power here and a new power there, that would do nicely, too. Death by a thousand cuts is still death." It is not clear whether the prime minister, Gordon Brown, intends a Labour "U-turn" on a debate about new powers that the party had previously tried to close down.
Nor is it clear whether Mr Brown or Conservative leader David Cameron grasp the extent to which their "national" parties are being eclipsed in Scotland by a nationalist leader convinced that time and tide are with him.