Alistair Darling’s legacy and Labour’s debated story of its past

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Good morning. Alistair Darling, who as chancellor of the exchequer helped steer the UK and the world through the global financial crisis, has died at just 70. My first thoughts and condolences are with his family.

As Chris Giles details in his superb obituary, Darling’s role in coordinating a response to the crisis makes him one of the most consequential of the postwar chancellors. Jeremy Hunt described him, rightly, as “one of the great chancellors”. Some further thoughts below on how Labour’s time in opposition has been marked by debates on how best to talk about the legacy of their last Treasury chief.

Labour past and present

When the young and hirsute Alistair Darling was first elected as a Lothian councillor, he did so as a Trotskyite firebrand. (He later recalled that as a young man he wanted to “nationalise everything”.) Neil Kinnock, after a difficult meeting with the Lothian Labour group in 1982, remarked, “I never want to see that bearded Trot becoming an MP”.

Five years later, Darling did. He would shave off both his Trotskyism and his beard, the former through conviction, the latter on instruction from Gordon Brown in 1997.

Darling’s role in steering the UK and the world through the financial crisis, and preventing it from spiralling into a repeat of the Great Depression, meant that we all have cause to be relieved that Kinnock’s wish was not granted.

One of the questions that has gripped Labour politicians since they left office is how to talk about Darling’s tenure. Under Ed Miliband, the shadow cabinet was divided. There were those, largely drawn from the party’s Blairite wing, who thought the party’s best approach was to apologise for running a large structural deficit during Brown’s last years at the Treasury. This was in order to both secure the credit for Darling’s actions during the crisis, and “concede and move on” from the row over Labour’s spending in office in the mid-2000s.

Others, most importantly Ed Balls, the then-shadow chancellor, took the view that this wouldn’t work. As one of their number put it, frequently: “We would concede — and no one would move on.”

Jeremy Corbyn did apologise for Labour’s mistakes in the run-up to the financial crisis — though he saw those decisions as the failures of the government’s financial regulation, rather than the deficit spending before the crisis.

Keir Starmer — and his director of strategy, Deborah Mattinson — have long argued that the party had to talk up its time in government, because, as one person familiar with their thinking puts it, “if it was so bad, why should we ever have another one?”.

Starmer’s namechecking of his party’s past in office — coming hand in hand with moves to modernise and change his party — recalls how David Cameron worked with John Major, who would often act both as a source of advice but also an outrider in the press for Cameron.

It’s in the business of political parties to try to rewrite history in a favourable way. Just as Labour now talks about the pressures caused by the end of near-zero interest rates as a “Tory mortgage premium”, which wildly overstates Liz Truss’s real contribution to higher interest rates, Cameron and George Osborne overstated Labour’s culpability for the financial crisis. (Or, going further back, New Labour’s evocation of Black Wednesday, September 1992, when sterling was ejected from the exchange rate mechanism of the European monetary system. The party downplayed that it had also wanted to take the UK into the ERM.)

It’s not a coincidence, I think, that New Labour’s final days also saw the beginning of Major’s reappraisal. Starmer is right to think that Labour’s route to success lies in finding a positive story about the party’s past as well as its future. That Darling’s time at the Treasury is now being spoken of in favourable terms by Labour’s opponents is, yes, about the death of a kind and thoughtful man well-liked by his opponents and allies. But it is also a result of a broader change in mood and political circumstances, just as the rising tide in favour of Cameron shifted perceptions of Major’s government in 2001.

Now try this

I’m off to see Noises Off at the theatre. Have a lovely weekend, however you spend it.

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