Alistair Darling, leading hand in the British financial crisis, dies aged 70

Alistair Darling, a British MP and minister who played a leading role in his country’s response to the 2008 global financial crisis by bailing out troubled banks with huge injections of public money that prevented a wider economic collapse, died on Thursday in a hospital in Edinburgh. . He was 70.

The cause was cancer, his family said.

Mr Darling joked that farewell tributes after his death would describe him as a steady pair of hands in the credit crisis that began in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Bros in the United States and sent shockwaves through the world’s banks.

The comment was about the money. In an obituary on Thursday, the BBC said Mr Darling “became best known as the steady pair of hands who ran the British economy when half the banking system collapsed”, noting his efforts to rescue British banking giants, especially the Royal Bank of Scotland. .

Just before the crisis, in 2007, Gordon Brown, then Britain’s Labor prime minister, appointed Mr. Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government’s most senior official responsible for the country’s finances. Until then, Mr Darling had held a series of government positions in the Treasury and in ministries dealing with welfare, pensions, trade and transport.

In times of crisis, “Alistair was the person you would want in the room because he was calm, he was taken into account and he had great integrity,” Mr Brown said.

The comment contrasted with Mr Darling’s assessment of Mr Brown’s management. In an autobiography published after Labor was defeated in 2010, Mr Darling said there was a “permanent atmosphere of chaos and crisis” in Mr Brown’s government.

The global crisis has left deep economic scars. “My first reaction must have been a bit like that of the captain of the Titanic when he was told by the ship’s architect that it would sink within a few hours,” Mr Darling wrote. “There were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers.”

The troubles with Britain’s banks began with a run on the regional Northern Rock bank, a frenzy that officials tried to counter with injections of public money.

Even at that time, economic conditions in Britain were “perhaps the worst in sixty years,” Darling said in a newspaper interview, and the slump would be “deeper and longer-lasting than people thought.” His comments sparked protests among Mr Brown’s supporters.

But as the crisis spread, Mr. Darling later said in an interview, his “scariest” moment came one morning during the crisis, when a top executive at the Royal Bank of Scotland told him the bank would then run out of money to sit. afternoon – an almost unthinkable prospect for a financial institution that is among the largest in the world.

“What was in my head at that moment is that if people thought the largest bank in the world had failed, there wouldn’t be a bank in the Western world that would be safe,” he said.

Mr Darling was widely praised for his handling of the crisis. But his subsequent political career was marked by a row with Mr Brown over post-crisis spending, with Mr Darling trying to impose some sort of cap. Ultimately, the Labor Party was voted out of office in 2010 and went into opposition.

Mr Darling has broken new bipartisan ground by campaigning alongside Conservative politicians against the idea of ​​Scottish independence. Opponents of secession won a referendum in 2014, but Scots turned against Labor in favor of the pro-independence Scottish National Party.

Mr Darling, elevated to the peerage in 2015 as Baron Darling of Roulanish and made a member of the House of Lords, campaigned unsuccessfully to oppose Britain’s departure from the European Union. In 2020 he withdrew from the Senate.

Alastair Maclean Darling was born on November 28, 1953 in London. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas and Anna (Maclean) Darling. His father was a civil engineer. He studied law in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen, where he had a reputation as a Marxist. He joined the Labor Party in 1977 and was elected to the British Parliament ten years later.

In 1986 he married a journalist, Margaret Vaughan, and they had two children, Calum and Anna.

Labor won a landslide victory in 1997 under Mr Blair, and Mr Darling became associated with the so-called New Labour-reform wing of the party around Mr Blair. Former colleagues said Thursday that he had a dry wit and a reputation for what Brian Wilson, a former Labor secretary, called “a good moral and political compass.”

But surprisingly, his political enemies in the Conservative government were unusually complimentary. Mr Darling had been “one of the great chancellors”, said Jeremy Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, adding that he “did the right thing for the country at a time of extraordinary turmoil”.