When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, the Labour party was split into three camps: those who genuinely adored Brown, those who believed he could change (elected as New Gordon, govern as New Gordon?) and a deflated Blairite rump that had given up the ghost. It is not immediately clear which of these camps is most reprehensible.
But the most culpable were those who knew that a Brown premiership would be a disaster and still allowed it to happen, including Tony Blair, who, as Alistair Darling reveals in this brilliant autobiography, said at the beginning of his premiership that working with Gordon Brown was “like facing the dentist’s drill without an anaesthetic”.
But the torrent of tales about Brown in office has become so hateful and humiliating, this latest account cannot tell us much about the man that we did not already know. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde has sympathetically called the process ‘death by memoirs’. Brown is politically dead. Discredited. Ed Balls, on the other hand, desires a return to his master’s old haunt. Brown might be beyond redemption, but Balls seeks it. These memoirs matter.
The image I usually have of Brown and Balls en cabinet is a sulky, square-jowled Prime Minister with a squat, diabolical sprite sat on his shoulder telling him what to do. You can see this in Back from the Brink, but Darling offers glimpses of an alternative image, that of a gangly-armed spewing baby gorilla clinging firmly to the back of its hulking, gloomy mother. Whenever Darling met with this matriarchal primate of a Prime Minister, Balls would be by his side. Brown may not have been able to make a decision without consulting Balls, but there is also something jejune about the protégé’s position in the dying months of New Labour.
Away from the political feuds, what most strikes me about Back from the Brink is Darling’s writing. It is fabulous. A Journey was said to have elevated the politician’s memoir to something nearly readable, albeit with a saccharine coating, like a painkilling pill. But Darling’s effortless style makes Tony Blair’s matey idioms read like a footballer’s biography — no, a footballer’s wife’s biography. This Edinburgh lawyer writes with a vigilant, unpretentious poise.
Compare it to Gordon Brown’s fascinating but rushed Beyond the Crash. Not only do the respective accounts prove that Alistair Darling was a better chancellor; he is also a better author and dramatist.
He has thought about timbre and structure. The narrative is linear, mostly, but sub-plots and character points are weaved into the overarching plotlines, namely the global financial crisis and the British economy.
Consider this marvellous denouement to the second chapter. It is December 2007, and the reader has been taken through the drama of the Northern Rock collapse. We know that further mayhem is in store. The chancellor has managed to return to Edinburgh for a short while to recuperate and take stock, but “there was a further development…which confirmed in my mind that if 2007 had been bad, the new year would be worse.”
He continues: “On a Saturday morning, just before Christmas, I answered the door at home in Edinburgh. There on the doorstep was Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive of RBS, holding a gift-wrapped panettone.”
Alistair Darling has sat on the front bench for twenty-two of his twenty-three years in Parliament. Only he, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown remained in Cabinet for all of Labour’s thirteen years in power. He stage-managed a state led rescue of Britain’s banking system despite having to endure the next-door neighbour from hell. If Brown had listened to his chancellor instead of his inner (and outer) demons, electoral politics might have followed a different course.
Sir Winston Churchill famously claimed that history would be kind to him, for he would write it. Alistair Darling is the sort of politician who history should be kind to, whoever writes it. But this is one hell of a good start.
Recommended reading:
Beyond the Crash (2010) by Gordon Brown
This is a book that stands out from the maelstrom of New Labour memoirs as refreshing – perhaps touching – for not indulging in backbiting. It is a contradiction. Full of
questions for the future, yet from a man that too often asked the right ones and came up with the wrong answers. Written by a soul clearly desperate for repentance, yet offering none.
On a brief character note, observe Brown and Darling’s respective treatments of key figures such as Baroness Vadera.
Whatever It Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour (2011) by Steve
Richards
It is often said that the destructive rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was a result of personality, not politics. It is clear from Darling’s book that Gordon Brown’s
personality was significant; however, he forcefully argues that Labour lost because it departed the centre ground of politics and forsook the hard-won faith of businesses. The
Independent’s Steve Richards, one of Britain’s most attentive commentators, digs underneath the internecine character clashes to stress that politics prefigured the crash of New Labour
as much as the falling out of old friends.
The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (2010) by Lord Mandelson
Alistair Darling dismembers his opponents with guile and wit, but also a sense of remorse, as though he is pained to do it. Humility makes great men twice honourable. The former First
Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council self-satisfyingly kicks adversaries and friends alike in the private parts till the pips squeak and expects them to enjoy it. It is a
smutty kiss-and-tell, which delights in revealing a sociopathic form of government, but offers no answers, let alone any questions. So everything that Back from the Brink isn’t.
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