A politician happy in his own skin

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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