Politics needs to be more Alistair Darling

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

One of the oddest features of the tributes paid in recent days to Alistair Darling was the prominence given to Gordon Brown.

The former Prime Minister was all over the airwaves honouring Darling, the former Chancellor who died last week aged 70.

This jarred. Anyone who knew Alistair Darling relatively well knew that Gordon Brown made life very difficult for Darling, particularly in the period running up to the financial crisis of 2008.

When Tony Blair was forced in 2007 to hand over the premiership to Brown, who seemed to think Number 10 was his by God-given right, the new Prime Minister had appointed Darling to the Treasury. Problems emerged almost straight away.

They were old colleagues, friends even, from Scottish politics and during the Blair era had worked together relatively happily in government, with Darling doing a good job in numerous departments while Brown ruled the Treasury and conducted his long campaign to remove Blair.

It is difficult to describe now to anyone who wasn’t around then how overblown Brown’s sense of self-importance was in that era. The grandiose briefings from his acolytes spoke of a man of destiny impatient to get in there and transform Britain as soon as the usurper Blair could be removed. Fear was instilled. Criticism was not welcome, as some of us journalists discovered.

When Brown finally got the status he wanted it became clear he had very little idea what he wanted to do as PM in specific policy terms. There wasn’t much left in the tank after a decade in power as part of that dysfunctional partnership with Blair.

Brown had been at his most politically effective as a foil to Tony Blair. I don’t wish to suggest they were a Lennon and McCartney pairing (I like The Beatles too much) but in Brown’s solo efforts there were shades of Wings at their worst.

In the middle of this was stuck Alistair Darling, dealing calmly and intelligently with a surreal situation not of his making.

Although Brown chose Darling as Chancellor in 2007 it was as though he or his subordinates regretted the decision soon after. Reports circulated that Darling would be replaced by Ed Balls. Perhaps Ed Balls, a long-time Brown aide and by then in cabinet in his own right, felt he had been offered the Treasury or as an economist would be better suited to it than the incumbent.

When I wrote something disobliging about Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper in that period, I was told by someone at the court of Brown to back off because that man – Ed – was the next leader of the Labour party and that was Gordon’s assumption, that he would hand over to Ed once he had won the next election. It was a bizarre period. The Brown team had lived for too long inside their paranoid world of briefings and feuds, making so many promises to each other, that by 2007 they had become stuck in a hall of mirrors.

When I see former New Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell and others talk about how dysfunctional contemporary politics has become (and it is pretty dysfunctional), I do wonder if they ever reflect on their role in making it so. Public life and power has always involved egotism and infighting, but under New Labour’s regime of obsessive media management and control freakery it became a relentless and unpleasant psychodrama that foreshadowed Britain’s post-Brexit politics.

What is clear is that Darling was treated absolutely appallingly by Number 10 and Brown’s supporters. When Alistair gave a famous interview to the Guardian in August 2008 warning quite rightly of the economic storm ahead, Number 10 was furious and it seemed as though the Chancellor could be fired for being too gloomy. Within weeks the storm broke, the over-leveraged banks almost ran out of money and Darling was vindicated.

He led the rescue of the banking system, nationalising RBS, which had grown to become at precisely the wrong moment  the world’s largest bank.

As a free market person, I was deeply sceptical at points about the Treasury’s approach, and wrote accordingly. In theory, shouldn’t irresponsible banks be allowed to go bust to teach shareholders, investors and depositors to pay attention to where they put their money?

Yes, I can hear Alistair saying, but we don’t live in theory, we live in practice. By the eve of the banking crisis, Britain had under Blair and Brown ballooned its banking sector to such an extent that the combined balance sheets, total assets, of the UK’s five clearing banks stood at a sum equivalent to 450% of UK GDP or annual economic output. For context, that figure at the time Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990 was around 70%. Although other countries grew their banking systems, and the exposure of their economies to financialisation, Britain really went for it under the Conservatives and then New Labour.

The big banks through their control of the payments system, and extension of credit to business, were so integral to the British economy that if one or more of them were allowed to go bust it would cause a cascade through the entire economy, wrecking the ability of businesses to pay their creditors. A modern banking crisis could quickly become a recession then a deep depression. The big banks have since been recapitalised and reformed and are in much safer condition than back then, though the regulators are now too intrusive and controlling, to the detriment of growth. It is a complex, subjective tradeoff, balancing safety in the system and the need for dynamism.

It was in the aftermath of the financial crisis period – writing Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy – that I got to know Darling better. He thought it was important that the mad tale of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s rise and fall be told fairly. He was kind, generous with his time and thoughtful in his insights.

It was a global banking crisis but there had been terrible policy failures under New Labour and during Brown’s own tenure as Chancellor in the boom years. The problem was that by 2005 Brown was focussed to the point of obsession on removing Blair. Nothing could be allowed to get in the way.

The Brown message in the years before the crisis was that he – the great economic maestro – had delivered on his domestic side of the New Labour bargain, whereas Blair had failed in Iraq and on foreign affairs, the part of government to which Brown patronisingly thought Blair should restrict himself.

Mention of problems building in the banking system and the economy would have been unhelpful in 2005-2007 because it undermined the narrative by which Brown planned to take power. When he could have increased bank supervision, ordered investigations into the wilder side of financial innovation, and prepared the public finances better for a potential downturn, he did not. Doing any of that would have been an admission that there was something up with the Brown economic miracle. It will be interesting to see if we ever get an acknowledgement of this by Brown in a proper memoir, set of diaries or interview. I am not holding my breath.

When it came to the hottest part of the crisis itself – in October 2008 and into the following Spring – Brown and Darling settled within days after the banks almost fell over into a perfectly productive, straightforward relationship. Time was so tight and the decisions so enormous that there was little room for role-playing by Number 10. Darling served as Chancellor up to the 2010 election, though the relationship with Brown had, understandably, been ruined by bad memories.

I’ve concentrated on the difficult period of Alistair Darling’s career for the simple reason that his exemplary behaviour at that moment of crisis illustrates what manner of man he was and the scale of his contribution to public life. He did not fold under the pressure of the appalling treatment by Brown’s allies in 2007 and up until October 2008. His endurance meant Britain had the right man at the right time in the right place when the crisis hit. Others faced with such an onslaught pre-crisis might have quit in a huff, or tried in desperation to please the Prime Minister. Instead, Darling weathered the storm and stuck to taking decisions calmly, speaking lucidly and behaving respectfully to colleagues and others, always peppering his interactions with flashes of dry wit.

As the world whirls ever faster, propelled by technological change, geopolitical upheaval and social media madness, with nuance-hating populists suggesting there are beguilingly simple answers to complex problems, this is what we need. The only way we can hope to deal successfully with the tumult is for politics to be more Alistair Darling.

Is BBC editorial bias now deliberate?

On Friday morning, the truce between the terrorists of Hamas and the state of Israel came to an end. This is an important moment in the conflict. Why the truce ended – with perhaps 140 hostages still in Gaza – matters, because it tells us something about the conduct and motivations of the two sides.

It seems pretty clear that the truce broke down because rockets were fired from inside Gaza at Israel, prompting the IDF to resume operations. It was all over the Sky News website. Numerous news reports state this was the sequence of events and it has not been denied by any credible source.

According to Axios, the hostage talks broke down when Hamas tried to change the terms of the existing agreement. Israel’s chief negotiator insisted this was unacceptable. Then rockets were fired again at Israel.

Hamas ended the truce, it seems. One would have thought this should be big news – a top line – considering all the marching there has been, and the calls for a ceasefire, as though a full ceasefire agreement is possible with a genocidal terrorist organisation that exists only to wipe Israel from the map. Hamas, the people all the marchers say want a ceasefire, ended the truce. What does that say about the trustworthiness of these bloodthirsty terrorists as interlocutors?

This was, clearly, a highly relevant development.

Not on the BBC on the main 10pm news bulletin on Friday night it wasn’t. There was no mention of it in nine minutes of reports, centred on Israel’s renewed attacks on targets in Gaza. If there was any mention of it I missed it, or it was the briefest of throwaway lines in passing. The episode is not online yet on the BBC site.

Many others spotted this strange omission and the emphasis instead on Israel resuming operations, as though the IDF had casually ended the exchange of hostages. On a WhatsApp group I’m on, the next morning there was weary discussion about what on earth is going on inside the BBC editorial decision-making process. Is it groupthink? A cock-up? Unconscious bias? Or deliberate bias?

Like most journalists, I have friends in the Beeb and was raised on BBC broadcasting. Some of my favourite journalists work for the corporation.

Yet something has gone very badly wrong when this happens. When an absolutely central question on a major news event – the truce ended, why? – is not dealt with prominently and at length in the main bulletin and, yes, balanced with reports of Israeli strikes, then the national broadcaster is giving a dangerously distorted picture of what happened that day. 

Era ending fast

To the Rosewood Hotel, London, for the Spectator’s parliamentarian of the year awards last week. This is where over dinner the magazine hands out its annual gongs to the political class. There are funny, and not so funny, acceptance speeches. This year Suella Braverman was the senior figure who bombed with a rather bitter set of remarks. What a contrast with the gracious speech made by Tory rising star Claire Coutinho, secretary of state for energy security.

But assessing these things according to the normal Westminster game of “who’s up, who’s down” seems inadequate and even pointless considering the scale of the change underway.

At the drinks beforehand, there was the deepest Tory gloom. They are facing a calamitous squeeze and starting to worry about the risk of a proper wipeout, with the party potentially facing being reduced to 150 seats or below at the general election.

The leadership’s hope had been that installing competent, moderate Rishi Sunak after the disastrous Truss interregnum would restore some order. The Tory vote share was supposed to be rising by now, setting up a close contest in which the Conservatives might sneak it against a Labour leader said not to have sealed the deal with the public.

It has not turned out that way, or not yet. Sir Keir Starmer is growing in confidence, witness him beating Sunak at PMQs last week. Labour is twenty plus points ahead in the opinion polls and now Sunak faces an attack from the right in the shape of Nigel Farage and the Reform/Brexit party that is polling up to 10 points, and maybe soon higher, on the back of unrest over record immigration. 

This backdrop gave the whole evening at the Spectator awards an end of an era feel.

The awards used to be a rather simple, boozy lunch in the Savoy, but under my friend Fraser Nelson’s editorship they have become a very impressive, lavish evening production. This year, the beautifully drawn and lit set had a theatrical curtains theme. Closing the evening, Fraser spoke of the curtain falling.

The Spectator has been up for sale, along with its sister publication the Daily Telegraph, and ownership may now transfer to the old owners, the Barclay family. The intention seems to be for it to then pass into the hands of the UAE ruling family, although the UK government may try to prevent this or seek guarantees about editorial independence. The old Fleet Street joke about guarantees, being not worth the paper they’re not written on, springs to mind.

All in all, one of Britain’s most illustrious titles, and the editorial and commercial teams who have built it up, finds itself landed in an extraordinary situation by its erstwhile owners and the banks.

German security nightmares

On encountering anyone who isn’t worried about the European security crisis, I advise asking them if they own a television set. If the answer is affirmative, tell them to turn it on and start watching the news. In addition there is plenty out there to read about the crisis, not least on Reaction.

Maps help too. Tell anyone sceptical to look at a map of the proud, brave Baltic states, and observe how thin the strip of land is between the sea and Russia. Look also at Russia’s activities on the Finnish border, and consider the threat in what is termed the High North, to say nothing in the Baltic of undersea cables for communications and the energy supply risks.

The context is Ukraine struggling to make advances, with Russia retooled as a war economy and pumping out more than two million shells next year when most of Europe’s governments are struggling to get their act together to replenish supply and build deterrence.

If Putin wins, or gets territory in a peace deal, the dictator or his successor will be emboldened and the risk rises of other incursions, wars or operations in Europe in the years ahead.

Europe, yes Britain included, we are in NATO, needs to be in completely different “headspace” in which deterrence becomes the watchword, particularly if the US under Trump goes isolationist. The Poles, spending more than 4% of GDP on defence, get this and are arming at high speed.

A report last week in The Times on German readiness made for sobering reading, though. At a conference in Berlin leading experts revealed Germany will not be able to fight a defensive war, if it comes to that, for 15 years. The logistical dilemmas give the experts nightmares, apparently. At NATO they do comprehend the scale of the challenge and are determined to push through the updated plans that divide Europe up into three theatres of deterrence – north, centre and south – with nuclear power Britain key in the north.

It would be better, and nicer all round, if none of this was necessary. Unfortunately, once again it is. 

What I’m watching

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. If you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil the ending…

So much has been written about the film and several cinematic historical inaccuracies contained therein that another long screed on this is not needed.

I will say only that while the Empress Josephine, played with verve by Vanessa Kirby, was highly believable, I simply couldn’t take Joaquin Phoenix seriously as Napoleon. At no point did suspension of disbelief come. At no point did I think, look, there’s Napoleon. It was always Phoenix, standing around not saying much, wearing a uniform and looking dazed, glancing off into the middle distance as though the answer lay there.

Have a good week. It’s nearly Christmas.

Iain Martin,
Publisher and CEO,
Reaction