‘This job isn’t good for the soul’

Alistair Darling talks to Fraser Nelson about the importance of telling the truth, why Labour’s cuts are ‘kinder’, and the disheartening trudge between Number 11 and the Commons

Is Scottish black pudding made from the blood of pig or sheep? Alistair Darling insists it’s sheep. ‘I don’t have any in at the moment, I’m afraid,’ he says, almost apologetically. But he gives me the name of the butcher in his beloved Isle of Lewis — Charley Barley — from whom he orders his supplies.

It’s 50 minutes into our interview and a Treasury aide, who had hoped to keep the interview to 35 minutes, throws down his pen, declaring that he is ‘struggling to tune into this conversation’. But the Chancellor is in a talkative mood.

He spent two weeks in Stornoway last month and is full of the joys of Scotland: ‘There was one day when the phone didn’t go for at least five hours!’ he says. This is clearly the longest period without interruption he can remember. ‘I thought maybe we’d been disconnected, or that a sheep had eaten through the cable or whatever. But no — it was just quiet.’ So, I suggest, perhaps this means the world isn’t collapsing in the way it was last summer? Perhaps the worst of the recession may just be over?

Darling’s face darkens. ‘Most people don’t say that if the economy starts to grow at zero-point-something then things are better. They judge it by what happens when they go out of the front door.’ Given his prediction that unemployment ‘will continue to rise into next year’, he suspects most people may not like what they see.

Pessimism has become Darling’s trademark — and with reason. When he was made Chancellor just over two years ago, Britain looked a very different place.