Is Darling paving the way for some “humility” from Brown?

Hm.  I was quite surprised by Alistair Darling’s interview with the Telegraph this morning.  To my ear, Government rhetoric has been hardening over the past few weeks; the same old soundbites about “Tory cuts” and “Problems which started in America” used ever more defiantly.  But here we have a softening of approach, and – although there are some sleights of hand (Darling refers to mistakes made over the “last 15 years” – i.e. these were Tory mistakes too) – something close to an admission of Government guilt.  Here are the key passages from the article:

“There are a lot of lessons to be learnt by regulators, governments, all of us,” [Darling] says.

“The key thing that went wrong was that a culture was allowed to develop over the last 15 years or so where the relationship between what people did and what they got went way out of alignment, especially at the top end.