A politician happy in his own skin | The Spectator

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Alistair Darling’s Back from the Brink is not just a compulsive read: it is an essential primer for anyone with aspirations to be Prime Minister or Chancellor. It’s not unlike the manual in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with ‘Don’t Panic’ emblazoned on the front. The glory of this book is that, unlike Mandelson’s bitch fest of self-congratulation, malice and poison towards anyone who was not in total awe of The Presence, Darling comes out of it all as an unlikely hero. There is not the dull scrape, as there is in most political memoirs, of a large case being dragged across the floor where a trumpet is lovingly removed and blown at every opportunity. It has been far too easy for reviewers just to concentrate on the purple passages and forget about the central problems of the Blair and Brown eras, their mutual and self- destructive hatred, the collapse of cabinet government, the sidelining of officials, making policies on the hoof and a total lack of understanding of the grave that the banks were digging. Blair, through sheer charm of personality just about got away with it. Brown, locked himself away in his own personal Gormenghast, surrounded by trembling courtiers and his own private mafia of enforcers, his eyes flicking from face to face, seeing betrayals, conspiracies and bizarre plots in the guttering candlelight. By contrast, King Lear seemed to be a well grounded barrel-load of laughs. When Darling entered the Treasury as Chancellor he noted the gloom of the place, where Gordon Brown would rely on his own advisors rather than officials. 'My arrival as chancellor heralded something of a culture change in the Treasury, especially for the senior officials. During his ten year tenure, Gordon had tended to deal with them through his special advisors, principally Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. He worked on the strategy; his advisors made sure the detail fitted the strategy. Unlike other departments I had worked in, where officials were used to working with the Secretary of State directly, many senior Treasury officials had never actually sat down with the Chancellor himself.' The decision-making processes of Brown when prime Minister was even more bizarre. 'All too often I would come out of a meeting with Gordon believing that a decision had been reached, only for it to transpire that he had spoken to someone else with a different opinion and changed his mind… A meeting with Gordon involved many elephants in the room… there was no sign of clarity or direction. It was all about tactics rather than strategy.' A really good example of this was the abolition of the 10% tax rate fiasco. Brown had slammed down anyone who warned of the consequences. Darling saw the figures realising that 5 million households would lose out and it would cost £6.5 billion to fix. It was not surprising that there was a humiliating U-turn. I am not going to deal at length with the poison of Balls, MacBride and Valera nor the plot to remove Darling as Chancellor. It’s old hat. Though pretty malicious and humiliating old hat. To his credit Darling just told Brown if he wanted to replace him with Balls, that’s a matter for him, but don’t expect him to remain in government. No tantrums, no ultimatums. As in his handling of the banking meltdown, Darling showed cool judgement and a steely resolve. And this is when this book comes alive. His contempt for the arrogance of most of the bankers, who behaved with the Treasury with an aloof disdain, is fully justified. At one stage, he notes that our GDP was £1.5 trillion, while RBS’s liabilities approached £1.9 trillion. There was a time when the whole banking system had a matter of hours before total collapse. We would not have been able to use our credit and debit cards and there would have been a meltdown of Armageddian proportions. So he called in the CEOs to tell them his rescue plan. 'The negotiators for the banks, I was told, were looking increasingly frantic. The bankers themselves were not. The civil servants remained calm because they had a better overall picture. Most of the negotiators for the individual banks only knew what was happening on their own patch. Panic was setting in as they felt that they could not get a deal that they could live with. At about 11 o’clock it was apparent that some of the chief executives were putting up a last stand fight. I called them back into my room and said that of course we could talk about the detail, but tonight they had to accept the key proposals. I realised that as long as I was there they would think we were open to negotiation, so I said I was going to bed at 1 o’clock and wasn’t going to be called before 5am and only if it was to approve the announcement. Leaving the Treasury building to go back to Number 11, I told my private secretaries they would probably give in once I was gone, and said goodnight.' The plan was to pump in £50 billion of our money to keep these greedy and totally incompetent banks afloat. At one stage, RBS had invested in a golf course in Florida 70 miles from the nearest road, as well as cemeteries and trailer parks of dubious value in the deep south. With gallows humour, Darling noted that the new RBS HQ is built on the site of a former asylum at Gogarburn. Aided by Catherine Macleod’s deft tweaks, this is a readable and indispensible book. I was not surprised to see David Cameron clutching it at PMQs, for it seals the fate of Brown’s most trusted advisors, Balls and Miliband. It was Darling who wanted to tackle the deficit and Balls who wouldn’t let him. It was Darling who wanted to raise VAT to 20 per cent and Balls who blocked him. I have always liked Alistair Darling, but after reading this book and seeing the way he stood up to Brown and the bankers, I rather admire him. Here is a rare creature, a politician who is happy in his own skin. History will treat him well.

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Digested read: Back From the Brink by Alistair Darling

Atlantic, £19.99


John Crace
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 September 2011 21.30 BST

I don't believe in panicking before it's absolutely necessary but I came close to considering it on the morning of 7 October 2008 when the British banking system was in meltdown. On reflection, it would have been helpful if I had started panicking rather earlier. In my 10 years in government I had acquired a reputation as a man to whom you could give a tricky ministerial post, on the grounds that I was unlikely to be able to mess things up much further, so I should have predicted trouble when I was appointed chancellor in 2007. Unfortunately for you, when I did all the sums in June everything looked good, despite the fact that for years analysts had been saying the housing boom was unsustainable and that the banks were dangerously unregulated.

The collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 was the first sign that anything was at all wrong in the British economy. And I must say, though I say so myself, I handled the crisis exceedingly well. I don't want to cast blame on either Mervyn King or Gordon Brown – both of whom I hold in the highest esteem – but their incompetence and intransigence made finding a solution extremely difficult and it was only my brilliance in offering guarantees to all savers that averted financial meltdown.

I have always regarded Gordon with the utmost respect, even though he clearly thought I was a bit of an idiot, and it saddens me to have to say his years as PM were the most disastrous in living memory. It could all so easily have been different had he listened to me. He appeared weak within months of taking office, by dithering over whether to hold a general election. Had he bothered to ask me, I would have advised him not to. There was no point in taking a chance on losing an election when there was the guarantee of doing so in 2010. It also didn't help that we appeared incompetent by losing HMRC computer files. If only everyone had known we would be losing billions of pounds a day soon after!

When I told the Guardian in 2008 we were facing the worst downturn in 60 years I was obviously misquoted but now that prediction has turned out to be true I'm happy with my reputation as a plain-speaking politician. If only the same could be said of Mervyn King and Gordon Brown, both of whom I hold in the utmost respect, but who seemed to have no comprehension of the seriousness of the situation when we had to effectively nationalise RBS and HBOS. It is also very important to remember that it wasn't just me who had no idea what was going on as the global financial markets were equally badly hit. It is very easy in hindsight to point out that millions of ordinary people had been questioning just how long the growth bubble could be sustained, but the fact is that not-so-ordinary people like me and other finance ministers were perfectly justified in hoping it wouldn't burst on our watch. It's just unfortunate that it did and I take great credit for steadying the world's banking system by wiping trillions of pounds off the FTSE 100 index.

It saddens me that the British public did not understand what a monumental service I had done the world, but at least I had the recognition of the other financial experts who, like me and the Tories, had failed to understand the severity of the crisis. But I was touched that George Bush recognised me after Gordon had slammed the White House door in my face, a favour I am now happy to return by slamming the door in what remains of his political career.

Much as I respect Gordon, I feel that his bullying personality and his ignorance of budgetary concerns have not helped to cast a favourable shadow on my time as chancellor. He continually failed to respond to my pessimistic forecasts and showed poor judgment both on the 10p tax rate and my proposals to raise VAT. To be fair, I'm a little hazy about the arguments myself, but all I can say is that when push came to shove, Gordon didn't sack me. There are advantages to making a job so toxic, no one wants it.

Throughout the crisis, my loyalty to the Labour party has never wavered and even on the day before the general election in 2010, I still believed we could win. Which proves my judgment remained hopeless to the end.

Digested read digested: I wasn't quite as rubbish as all that. Honest.

Digested read: Back From the Brink by Alistair Darling | Books | The Guardian

I was really interested in it for the depiction of how decisions actually got made - the pure politics part. I mean yeah, sure, New Labour presided over an economic collapse, but I already knew that. I'm kind of interested in seeing how Tiberius-like Brown was in power (well, sans little Syrian rentboys, one hopes). It's a nice insight into how people actually cope with power.

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Also, there's just something very compelling about watching a government commit suicide.

All in all, I think that the Tory implosion of the late Thatcher/Major years was more enjoyable. They did unselfconscious decadent collapse with a sort of detatched irony that was almost endearing - to the point that one of them could stranglewank himself to death trussed up in womens underwear and everyone just thought "Hmm. Par for the course."

I think it also depends to a certain extent who you've got chronicling it. The Tories had Alan Clark, plus others like Giles Brandreth waiting in the wings. I think the Labour lot just take themselves too seriously, and mistaking arid Sylvie Krin prose for SRS BIZNESS doesn't help (Mandelson, I'm looking at you here).

This one's still reasonably good though, just for the panicked lack of coordination and naked self interest.

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It’s debatable whether politicians of the Left or the Right are better at handling the public finances. But we do seem to learn more about economics under a Labour government. Alistair Darling’s memoir chronicles his turbulent years at the Treasury as he watched the world slithering into a financial volcano. Though the material is extremely dramatic, Darling’s sober, measured prose doesn’t quite suit the story’s explosive theatricality. He was haunted by the Northern Rock crisis of 2007 and the global impact of TV images showing panicking investors queuing up to withdraw all their cash. That, he determined, must never happen again. More than once, as the crisis swept the world, he had to stage manage a calm exit from a summit in order to dash home and sort out a new phase in the calamity. With hindsight we should be thankful that this competent, humane and unflappable character was in the cockpit as the economy hit the roughest weather since the Great Depression. He brought the plane down in open water rather than into a mountainside. And he avoided a second run on a bank. Like any good politician he merrily clobbers his current opponents. When quantitative easing was first mooted, he reminds us, Vince Cable damned it as ‘the road to Harare’. And George Osborne declared that ‘printing money is the last resort of desperate governments’ (which isn’t quite same as ruling it out, of course). Both changed their minds in office. With his own colleagues, Darling is more cautious. He refuses to knife any Labour member (notably Ed Balls) whose career is still active. Of Gordon Brown and his uncontrollable rages he records this soon-to-be-legendary observation from Tony Blair. ‘It’s like facing the dentist’s drill without anaesthetic. It goes on and on.’ And though Darling discusses Brown’s gang of bullies in anonymous generalities, he correctly identifies the source of the problem: their political focus was perverted. They swung into action straight after Labour’s first landslide and their sole aim was to eject the sitting prime minister. ‘There wasn’t a plot,’ Darling says, ‘it was an open campaign.’ And ultimately Brown was ‘ill-served’ by his crew of whisperers and schemers, because ‘speaking the truth to power didn’t come into it.’ Brown would only hear ‘what he wanted, or could bear, to hear’. And once Brown was installed as prime minister, ‘the cabal sought fresh enemies’. This soft, chilling phrase is typical of Darling’s laconic manner. Brown had long intended to ditch his stand-in chancellor in favour of Ed Balls and Darling got ready to receive his marching orders with a ceremonial ‘Last Supper’ at Number 11. But the plan was scuppered by James Purnell’s shock resignation from the Cabinet in June 2009. Brown could no longer afford to lose his most senior colleague. He got his switchboard to summon Darling to a 7 o’clock meeting the next day. ‘I said I would come as soon as I had washed and shaved,’ comments Darling (and this ironic aside is the closest he gets to gloating). The prime minister gave his chancellor the news with a characteristic lack of grace. ‘OK, you can stay,’ he muttered. At this moment Darling held Brown’s destiny in his hand. Had he walked, Brown may not have survived the ensuing turmoil. But Darling’s ‘residual loyalty’, and his innate caution, prevented him from triggering a leadership crisis. Unusually for a senior politician, Darling has hardly any ego. The findings of opinion polls mean little to a man who buys his own groceries and can rely on the ‘Tesco test’. ‘I make a point of watching how people react when I go shopping. If they look away, you are in trouble.’ His innate decency prevents him from trashing figures like Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, who clearly infuriated him by making political statements. And he even refuses to denounce Sir Fred Goodwin, the RBS boss, who was responsible for the biggest business failure in history. His bank’s liabilities in 2007 totalled £1.9 trillion, (£400 billion more than the entire turnover of the British economy). And when RBS was saved, the British taxpayer got saddled with thousands of acres of worthless American trailer parks. Yet Darling’s only criticism is to question Sir Fred’s attempt to increase his pension entitlement of £400,000. ‘Most people could struggle by on that.’ The focus of this book is decidedly narrow and its chief appeal will be to policy wonks and credit-crunch watchers. But a longer, fuller, more wide-ranging memoir is bound to follow. Darling is one of the few ministers who served at Cabinet level throughout Labour’s 13 years in power. He has much more to tell us. Next time, one hopes, he will wield the blade a little more enthusiastically.

Back from the 1,000 Days at Number 11 | Alistair Darling | Review by The Spectator

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