And a close personal friend
And a close personal friend
On Alistair Darling's last great service to the Labour Party
One of my favourite comedy sketches is this one from Not The Nine O’Clock News, in which two politicians are having an argument on TV when one of them drops dead.1
It is, as they say, funny because it’s true. Politicians are almost invariably generous to their opponents in death, to an extent that can either sound insincere or expose a retrospective insincerity in their previous antagonism.2 But the generosity often, more often than you might think, really is sincere. Politicians of different parties have wide political differences, but they also have a lot in common: they all share an interest in political questions, they all believe in politics as a meaningful pursuit, and they all have the same job. Not all politicians have cross-party friendships, but several genuinely do. I confess to a mild unease with the George Osborne/Ed Balls Political Currency podcast, because its tone and format can sometimes obscure the fact that neither of them is a centrist, and that there’s nothing wrong with not being one; but it shouldn’t be surprising that these two former antagonists really are able to have interesting and friendly conversations with each other.
When former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling’s death was reported on Thursday, there were tributes from across the political spectrum, including this one tweeted by current Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt:
A sad day – I want to pay particular tribute to one of my predecessors, Alistair Darling. One of the great Chancellors, he’ll be remembered for doing the right thing for the country at a time of extraordinary turmoil. My deepest sympathies to his family.
This is a generous tribute that reflects well on Hunt, and I agree with all of it.3 But I’m slightly surprised Hunt does.
Not the deep sympathy thing, or the sadness, or even the judgement that Darling was “one of the great Chancellors”, but that “he did the right thing for the country at a time of extraordinary turmoil”. This is not the line.
George Osborne produced a similarly gracious tribute:
I think what Alistair Darling will be remembered for is someone who brought out the best in politics, you know, softly spoken, intelligent. Always trying to do the right thing, not always reaching for the political point scoring. And I think you’ll be able to point to two moments in Alistair’s career where he made a big difference for our country’s future. In the financial crisis, he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who earned a lot of trust with the way he handled that crisis. And I say that as someone who was against him at the time, and second, the Scottish referendum where he led the campaign to keep the United Kingdom together.
This is not the line either.
In 2008, the line was, in David Cameron’s words, “Nancy Cameron [his daughter, then aged 4] could handle the economy better than Alistair Darling”.4 The same year, he called for Darling to be sacked, a call he repeated at PMQs a year later. In 2009, Cameron’s line was that “Brown and Darling are like a couple of joy-riders in a car smashing up the neighbourhood, not caring what is going to happen and not caring about anyone who might have to take over the mess they have created”, and that Darling was like “some dodgy timeshare salesman who, if they behaved like that, would end up in court”. Darling’s 2009 pre-Budget Report was, according to Cameron, “cynical, irresponsible - borderline deceitful, frankly”. In 2010, Cameron’s line was that Darling’s main achievements as Chancellor were “to double the national debt and give us record youth unemployment”.
Great Chancellors are not cynical, irresponsible or borderline deceitful, they shouldn’t be sacked, and they cannot be outperformed by a four-year-old.
For the last 13 years, the Conservative line on the economy has been: they crashed it, we fixed it, don’t put them back in charge. It’s hard to square a line like that with the idea that the man Labour put in charge of the economy in one of the toughest times in our economic history was someone who “did the right thing” and “earned a lot of trust with the way he handled that crisis”.
You can overegg this, I know, and I’m not going to go on and on with a list of quotes that you probably assumed existed even if you couldn’t be bothered to look them up. Politics is an adversarial pursuit, people on both sides are playing to win and the Conservatives were perfectly within their rights to attack the then-Chancellor and his policies at the time. It isn’t surprising that they did, and it’s quite reasonable for them to have done so while basically respecting and liking the person they were attacking. But these tributes go beyond praise for his character to suggest that he was not just right on policy, but right on the policy that has formed the main economic dividing line of the last decade and a half.
At a time when the Conservatives’ management of the economy is - to say the least - open to debate, and when they still want to call Labour’s economic credibility into question by referring to their record last time they were in office, this is rather undermining. Perhaps the last of Alistair Darling’s many contributions to the Labour Party, over decades of service, was in death, in making the Conservatives admit in the run-up to an election that Labour isn’t so bad at running an economy after all. We all have a lot to be grateful to him for.
I don’t know why this has Finnish subtitles. Or rather, I do know why: it has Finnish subtitles so that people who speak Finnish can understand it; but I don’t know why the Finnish-subtitled version is the one that’s ended up on YouTube.
There are exceptions, including Joe Biden’s tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday which essentially says, “I disagreed with him about everything, but nobody can deny that he had a job and then continued to have opinions”.
It’s probably worth saying that although I met Alistair Darling a couple of times as a political staffer, I didn’t know him and have no personal insights to add: I worked quite closely with some people who worked closely with him, which is not the same thing. I’m always a bit wary of “I met him once” stories about encounters with recently-deceased famous people which can - inadvertently or otherwise - make the tributes more about the speaker than the subject.
No link for this one because so far as I can tell it’s not online: it’s in Dylan Jones’ 2008 book Cameron on Cameron, p. 111.