BOOKS JULIA LANGDON


WALKING TALL FROM THE WRECKAGE


Back from the Brink: 1,000 days at Number 11 Alistair Darling


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here is a somewhat Scottish self- deprecating style to any joke told by Alistair Darling. In 2009 when he won the “Survivor of the Year”


award in The Spectator magazine for holding on to his job as Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite the best efforts of Gordon Brown, he commented that he did not win many awards of any description. Indeed, the only previous one he could recall was “Most Boring Politician in Britain” by a trucking magazine when he was Transport Secretary. For two years in a row. Although there is evidently a gap between public perception and reality, being “boring” paid off for Alistair Darling. He was one of only three members of the last Labour Government who remained in the Cabinet throughout its 13 years in office and because of his modesty, honesty and utter loyalty to his party and the government, he emerged from the political wreckage it created with his head high and his reputation enhanced. And now he has written an important book about it. Primarily an account of his terrible three years as Chancellor, under the ill-fated premiership of Gordon Brown, it is in reality much more than that: it is the best political analysis I have read of how and why the Labour Government went so badly wrong from the very point of its election. It contains a message about the need for consultation and collective responsibility for an adminis- tration to function effectively, that all future governments would be foolish to ignore. It is a call for a return to proper Cabinet govern- ment and for the assertion of the greater significance of political policy over tactical positioning. It should be a textbook for today’s students of politics and on the reading list of anyone appointed as a government minister. The reason Alistair Darling has been able to pull off this triumph is interesting. When he was appointed Chancellor by Gordon Brown, it carried a clear message: that after 10 years in the job, the Prime Minister intended to carry on being his own Chancellor, thank you very much, and he had found just


the sort of compliant, loyal, yes-man to be his conduit and to do exactly what he was told. And to a certain extent that was initially the case. Darling charts in the book the sub- servient nature of his early relationships with Brown. Never part of the court of Prince Gordon, he was always happy to help and advise; when eventually Brown secured the crown, he even accepted the post at the Treasury as “clearly a stopgap appointment in his view”. But Gordon Brown has always rated loyalty


above competence and what he misunder- stood about the Chancellor who so surprisingly bested him was the nature of his loyalty.


Alistair Darling is almost entirely without vanity


and his ambition was for his party


Darling is almost entirely without vanity and his ambition was for his party, for it to achieve its political objectives through the government he had fought his whole political life to see elected. That was where his loyalty lay. He supported the New Labour project because it seemed the right way forward; he backed the leadership of Tony Blair and he fell in behind Gordon Brown, not out of personal loyalty to either man, but because they were meant to be helping to deliver the sunlit uplands for which Darling was working. And all of this, in Darling’s straightforward view, was something solemnly undertaken on behalf of a democratic commitment to improving the lives of the poor bloody voter, not a self- serving exercise in political one-upmanship and the pointless pursuit of power and author- ity for its own ends. Alistair Darling was his own man and he proved as much in office. He bested Brown not because he wanted to do so, but because he chose to do the right thing when it mattered.


Gordon Brown with Alistair Darling: ‘He bested Brown not because he wanted to do so, but because he chose to do the right thing’


We know it is all going to go wrong from page 6. Darling arrives at Number 11 with a sense of foreboding. He writes: “I was worried about my relationship with the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown.” How right he was. The book remorselessly records the disgraceful way in which the Prime Minister and the gofers in his office behaved towards everyone. That included the Chancellor, of course (it was even put about he had got too full of him- self because he won the Spectator award). But it took in the entire political spectrum: his political enemies; anyone who dared to dis- agree with him; the House of Commons; the electorate, and, in effect, the constitution. It is a delicious read. There is understand- ably a great deal about the economy, but it is manageable even for those who are bad at sums, and even quite consoling when it becomes apparent that being bad at sums is evidently widespread throughout the financial sector. There are enough personal observa- tions to lighten this and there is much of political interest for anyone. It is written with a quietly ironic style and, while Darling is not seeking to get his own back, there is also an underlying sense that the author knows that he has right on his side. As he has. This is the contemporary account of what went wrong and it succeeds because it is written without animus by a man who has nothing to lose. Someone who is defiantly his own man.


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