Alistair Darling

Alistair Maclean Darling, Baron Darling of Roulanish, (28 November 1953 – 30 November 2023) was a British politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under prime minister Gordon Brown from 2007 to 2010. A member of the Labour Party, he was a member of Parliament (MP) from 1987 to 2015, representing Edinburgh Central and Edinburgh South West.

Darling was first appointed chief secretary to the Treasury by prime minister Tony Blair in 1997, and was promoted to secretary of state for work and pensions in 1998. After spending four years at that department, he spent a further four years as secretary of state for transport, while also becoming secretary of state for Scotland in 2003. Blair moved Darling for a final time in 2006, making him president of the Board of Trade and secretary of state for trade and industry. After Brown succeeded Blair as prime minister, he promoted Darling to replace himself as chancellor of the Exchequer in 2007, a position he remained in until 2010. He served as chancellor during the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.

From 2012 to 2014, Darling was the chairman of the Better Together Campaign, a cross-party group that successfully campaigned for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom in the 2014 independence referendum. He was a vocal advocate for the Remain campaign for the 2016 European Union membership referendum. In November 2014, Darling announced that he was standing down at the 2015 general election. He was nominated for a life peerage in the 2015 Dissolution Honours and sat in the House of Lords until his retirement in 2020.

According to the Financial Times, Darling was "one of the most consequential post-war chancellors in modern British history".

Early life

Alistair Darling was born on 28 November 1953 in Hendon, then part of Middlesex (now London), the son of a civil engineer, Thomas, and his wife, Anna MacLean. He was the great-nephew of Sir William Darling, a Conservative/Unionist Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South (1945–1957) who had served as Lord Provost of Edinburgh during the Second World War. He was educated at Chinthurst School, in Tadworth, Surrey, then in Kirkcaldy, and at the private Loretto School, in Musselburgh. He attended the University of Aberdeen, from where he graduated as a Bachelor of Laws (LLB). He became the president of Aberdeen University Students' Representative Council.

Darling joined the Labour Party aged 23, in 1977. He became a solicitor in 1978, then changed course for the Scots bar and was admitted as an advocate in 1984. In 1982 he was elected to the Lothian Regional Council, where he supported large rates rises in defiance of Margaret Thatcher's rate-capping laws, and even threatened not to set a rate at all. He served on the council until he was elected to the House of Commons.

Member of Parliament

Darling first entered Parliament at the 1987 general election in Edinburgh Central, defeating the incumbent Conservative MP, Sir Alexander Fletcher, by 2,262 votes; and remained an Edinburgh MP for 28 years until he stood down in 2015.

Following the creation of the devolved Scottish Parliament, the number of Scottish seats at Westminster was reduced, and the Edinburgh Central constituency he represented was abolished, to be split between constituencies centred on peripheral areas of the city. The Labour government offered a peerage to Lynda Clark, the Advocate General for Scotland, so that Darling could contest the new Edinburgh South West constituency, the main successor to Clark's Edinburgh Pentlands constituency. At the 2005 general election, he won the seat. The Labour Party was so concerned that Darling might be defeated that several senior party figures, including deputy prime minister John Prescott and chancellor Gordon Brown, made encouragement trips to the constituency during the campaign. Despite being a senior Cabinet minister, Darling was hardly seen outside the area, as he was making the maximum effort to win his seat. In the event he won it with a majority of 7,242 over the second-placed Conservative candidate, the latter having been held back by the Liberal Democrats coming in a close third. Darling won by a comfortable 16.5% margin on a 65.4% turnout. In 2010, despite Labour's defeat nationally, he received an increased majority of 8,447.

Shadow Cabinet

As a backbencher he sponsored the Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1988. He soon became an opposition home affairs spokesman in 1988 on the front bench of Neil Kinnock.

Following the 1992 general election, he became a spokesman on Treasury affairs, but was promoted to Tony Blair's Shadow Cabinet as the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury in 1996.

In government

Following the 1997 general election, he entered Cabinet as the chief secretary to the Treasury. In 1998, he was appointed Secretary of State for Social Security, replacing Harriet Harman who had been dismissed. Following the 2001 general election, the Department of Social Security was abolished and replaced by the new Department for Work and Pensions, which also took employment away from the education portfolio. Darling fronted the new department until 2002 when he was moved to the Department for Transport, after his predecessor Stephen Byers resigned.

Secretary of State for Transport

Darling was given a brief to "take the department out of the headlines". He oversaw the creation of Network Rail, the successor to Railtrack, which had collapsed in controversial circumstances for which his predecessor was largely blamed. He also procured the passage of the legislation – the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003 – which abolished the Rail Regulator and replaced the post with the Office of Rail Regulation. He was responsible for the Railways Act 2005 which abolished the Strategic Rail Authority, a creation of the Labour government under the Transport Act 2000. Darling was also responsible for the cancellation of several major light rail schemes, including a major extension to Manchester Metrolink (later reversed) and the proposed Leeds Supertram, citing rising costs of £620 million and £486 million respectively.

Darling gave the government's support to the Crossrail scheme for an east–west rail line under London, whose £10 billion projected cost later rose to £15 billion.

Although he was not at the Department for Transport at the time of the collapse of Railtrack, Darling vigorously defended what had been done in a speech to the House of Commons on 24 October 2005. This included threats that had been made to the independent Rail Regulator that if he intervened to defend the company against the government's attempts to force it into railway administration – a special status for insolvent railway companies – the government would introduce emergency legislation to take the regulator under direct political control.

Secretary of State for Scotland

In 2003, when the Scotland Office was folded into the Department for Constitutional Affairs, he was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland in combination with his Transport portfolio.

Secretary of State for Trade and Industry

In the Cabinet reshuffle of May 2006, he was moved to be Secretary of State for Trade and Industry; Douglas Alexander replaced him as both Secretary of State for Transport and Secretary of State for Scotland. On 10 November 2006 in a mini-reshuffle, Malcolm Wicks, the Minister for Energy at the Department of Trade and Industry, and thus one of Darling's junior ministers, was appointed Minister for Science while Darling took over day-to-day control of the Energy portfolio.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

On 28 June 2007, the new prime minister and former chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown promoted Darling to replace himself as chancellor, a promotion widely anticipated in the media. Journalists observed that three of Darling's four junior ministers at the Treasury (Angela Eagle, Jane Kennedy and Kitty Ussher) were female, and dubbed his team "Darling's Darlings".

In September 2007, for the first time since 1860, there was a run on a British bank, Northern Rock. Although the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority have jurisdiction in such cases, ultimate authority for deciding on financial support for a bank in exceptional circumstances rests with the chancellor. The 2007 subprime mortgage crisis had caused a liquidity crisis in the UK banking industry, and Northern Rock was unable to borrow as required by its business model. Darling authorised the Bank of England to lend Northern Rock funds to cover its liabilities and provided an unqualified taxpayers' guarantee of the deposits of savers in Northern Rock to try to stop the run. Northern Rock borrowed up to £20 billion from the Bank of England, and Darling was criticised for becoming sucked into a position where so much public money was tied up in a private company.