Make your excuses and go

Politicians, like novelists, are obsessed by posterity. Practitioners of the here and now — tomorrow’s headline, the latest poll, the next electoral hurdle — they nurse secret and often vainglorious hopes that their greatest plaudits will come in the future. Before New Labour swept to power in 1997, senior Blairites used to joke about the need to get ‘their betrayals in early’. Now, 11 years later, as the government disintegrates painfully and publicly, Cabinet ministers are rushing to get their side of the story across, to make excuses, and to pass the buck.

Few political interviews have been parsed so closely or caused such an instant storm — financial and political — as Alistair Darling’s cri de coeur in Saturday’s Guardian. It has been argued by the Chancellor’s champions that he was only speaking the truth (if so, why didn’t he speak the truth on Budget Day?) and that his remarks were those of a commendably frank politician relaxing on holiday and unaware that what he said would whip up such a frenzy. Yet it is scarcely credible that Mr Darling, a veteran survivor who has been a senior minister throughout the New Labour era, would not have paused for thought before choosing his words.

Indeed, his language seemed hyperbolic by calculation. It is simply wrong to say that the economic times ‘are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’, as anyone who can remember the last Labour government knows full well. ‘This coming 12 months,’ the Chancellor added, ‘will be the most difficult 12 months the Labour party has had in a generation, quite frankly.’ Worse than the 1987 and 1992 elections, then? In case anyone had missed the point, Mr Darling explained that ‘people are p***ed off with us’. With friends like these, the Prime Minister must have thought, who needs David Cameron?

Mr Darling’s twisting of the skean dhu has been compared to Geoffrey Howe’s rhetorical assassination of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, but the closer parallels are with the resignation of Nigel Lawson in 1989.