Having spent the best part of a year writing my memoirs, I spent most of the summer trying to put them out of my mind. On a brief holiday in the Isle of Lewis, catching lobsters and catching up with friends, I stopped thinking about it. You can consider it part of a rehabilitation package for recovering ministers. I learned to use an iPad. I even appropriated my wife’s Kindle, and read my first e-book: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. At a table in the glorious Auberge guesthouse in Carnish, on the coast of the Outer Hebrides, it wasn’t hard to put away politics and economics.
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Now, at the close of summer, work comes back with a bang, or at least a ring of the doorbell, heralding Lesley White from the Sunday Times, which is serialising the book, and our old friend Murdo Macleod, the Hebridean photographer. He took the pictures of me three years ago to accompany a notorious interview in which I warned we might be facing the worst downturn in 60 years. The reaction brought the forces of hell down on my head. It turned out the PM believed it would be over in six months. As it transpired, my prediction was a bit on the bright side.
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The morning after, I head down the A1 alone. The car is packed with giant meringues and Mediterranean vegetable tarts. There’s no room for Margaret, my wife, who I’ve just seen off on a flight south, at the same time waving goodbye to our daughter Anna, who’s going to an American university for a year. There’s time to reflect, driving down the glorious coastal route, before a pit-stop at an excellent farm shop and café, Sunnyhills at Belford. I note Noah, the llama, is still for sale, and briefly consider buying him for the friends I’m visiting at the weekend. But he wouldn’t fit in the car, so I buy a packet of Paradise Slice cakes instead.My Blackberry has begun to ring again incessantly. The publishers fear bits of the book have been leaked. Newspapers and television journalists are calling for comment. As a Cabinet member, the phones never stopped, and the silence I enjoyed over the last year has been golden — but I’m going to lose it again, at least for a while. My phone is ringing as I drive, and I explain I can’t do an interview while on the motorway. It might end in the sort of pre-launch publicity that I don’t need.
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My weekend is spent at the wedding of Torsten, who was special adviser while I was at the Treasury. We are, once again, united on a shared mission. Margaret’s doing the cooking, my friends Catherine and George are organising the marquee. I’m the help. There will be 150 guests. I am delighted when George offers me the chance to mow the grass with his new ride-on lawnmower. It reminds me of life on my grandfather’s farm where I learned to drive a tractor age 12 — in those glorious days before health and safety were invented. I also get to use George’s JCB forklift, to move hay bales in a circle for the guests to sit on. The marquee is stupendous, the Dorchester of tents. We set about arranging it, while fielding calls every couple of minutes about what is and is not in my memoirs.
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The first hard copy of the book is sent to me, on the farm, on the morning of the wedding: it is an odd sensation to see words penned in February and March staring out from the page. I put it in a drawer and return to the marquee to see another former colleague, Tessa Jowell, who has taken time off the Olympics to deploy her organisational skills on the flowers: on time and on budget too. As we leave for the wedding ceremony, the helpers drafted in from as far away as Brazil and Leicester, New Zealand and Tottenham are furiously chopping and mixing. It doesn’t look like fun but there is a lot of laughter. The newlyweds return to the sunlit garden, and all is calm, as canapés and prosecco are efficiently deployed. I display my knife skills, carving the meat. Who says Labour can’t cut?
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As the dancing gets going, I am relieved to find there is a caller to tell me which of my two left feet to put where and when. Sadly I have to take my leave around 11 p.m., just as some very stylish moves are being displayed on the dance floor by a number of political advisers. There’s an interview with Andrew Marr to be done next morning on the BBC. I head back to face the camera, and my critics. I suspect everyone who has written memoirs suffers a
pre-launch knot of anxiety. Was it worth it? I’ll leave that for the readers to judge.
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Alistair Darling was Chancellor of the Exchequer from June 2007 to May 2010. His memoir, Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, is out now.
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