Alistair Darling, the former Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who has died of cancer aged 70, was appointed to run the Treasury in the early summer of 2007, just weeks before a devastating credit crisis at Northern Rock led to the first run on a British bank in 150 years, which would in turn serve as the harbinger of the ensuing global financial recession. It was Darling who announced that the government and the Bank of England would guarantee the deposits at Northern Rock and who later ordered the £50bn rescue of the Royal Bank of Scotland within hours of its collapse.
He would reflect afterwards that Britain had been perilously close to a breakdown in law and order, which could have been precipitated by the failure of what was then, if briefly, the largest bank in the world. He thus left the Treasury in 2010, after three tumultuous years, with his previously established reputation for maintaining stability in times of trouble considerably enhanced. His earlier close friendship with the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, was ruptured, however, by the differences over how they handled the sequence of critical events of the period.
