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.
Lord Darling of Roulanish, as he became on joining the House of Lords in 2015, exhibited a number of characteristics that marked him out as a highly unusual politician. He was not personally ambitious and never wanted to lead his party. He believed it was fundamentally important to be straight with people and always to tell as much of the truth as was feasible in the prevailing circumstances. And he took pride in being a pragmatist.
He was also funny, fearless and self-effacing – in a restrained, dry and very Scottish manner – and, in consequence, he was universally liked and respected by fellow politicians in all parties; itself an unusual compliment for anyone involved in the politics of either Westminster or Scotland. He once said that he wanted to be remembered as the government minister who began the eradication of childhood poverty, an objective he pursued in several of his many ministerial posts. He joked, however, on another occasion, that his obituary was likely to be headed “a safe pair of hands”, as the phrase had been so often attached to his political career.
Darling was one of only three ministers who were in the cabinet throughout the duration of the Labour governments between 1997 and 2010; the others being Jack Straw and Gordon Brown, whom he succeeded as chancellor when the latter became prime minister. His evident ability had been recognised as soon as he arrived in the House of Commons in 1987 as the MP for Edinburgh Central, and he was promoted by Neil Kinnock to the frontbench within a year. After Tony Blair swept into office, Darling was initially appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, chosen by his fellow Scot Brown for that important post. He subsequently served as secretary of state for social security (1998-2001); work and pensions, as social security became (2001-02); transport (2002-06); Scotland (2003-06); and trade and industry (2006-07).
His political hero was Labour’s postwar prime minister Clement Attlee, whose skilful tactics he imitated to some extent: he appeared unassuming, but was nevertheless extraordinarily assiduous and believed profoundly in the power of politics to resolve an issue through economic action. Unlike Attlee, however, he was also an impressive public performer. He was of a political generation that believed in the role of the state in the country’s affairs, but he further recognised the need for that role to evolve and for individuals to accept a degree of personal responsibility in their relationship with public services. It was this thinking that led to the renaming of the former Department of Social Security to Work and Pensions under his stewardship, in order to reflect both the primacy of work and the principle of pensioners having a share in the country’s rising prosperity.
Such thoughtful revisionism gave Darling the intrinsic qualifications needed for Blair’s New Labour vision, but he was always his own man and never signed up as a political intimate on either side of the Blair-Brown power play. He went in to politics to get things done, because he believed in strong public services, better education and equality of opportunity, and had no taste for factional in-fighting.
He was born in London, the eldest of four children of Thomas Darling, a civil engineer with a double first from Cambridge, and Anna (nee Maclean), whose family came from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides – to which Darling paid tribute in his choice of title as a life peer. His grandfathers were both Liberals, and one great-uncle, Sir William Darling, had been a Conservative and Unionist MP (Edinburgh South 1945-57) and lord provost of Edinburgh. The family moved back to Scotland when Alistair was 12 and he was sent to the country’s oldest boarding school, Loretto, near Edinburgh, after attending seven primary schools. He read law at Aberdeen University, became involved in student politics and joined the Labour party in 1977. He was a solicitor from 1978 until 1982 and then decided to move to the Scottish bar, becoming an advocate in 1984.
In 1982 he was elected as a Lothian regional councillor for the Haymarket and Tollcross area of Edinburgh. He served on the Lothian and Border police board (1982-86), was a governor of Napier College, Edinburgh (1982-87) and chaired the regional transport committee (1986-87). He was chosen from a shortlist of two to contest the newly marginal seat of Edinburgh Central in 1987, and defeated the sitting Conservative minister, Alex Fletcher. He was elected four times for the constituency, which was abolished in 2005, then moved to become MP for Edinburgh South West, before standing down in 2015 when he promised to “find another dragon to go and fight”.
Darling was ambivalent about Scottish devolution in 1979 – although he voted in favour in that year’s unsuccessful referendum, he retained doubts about its practicality until he became more actively involved in politics. Once an MP, he worked behind the scenes on the agenda for a number of constitutional and legal reforms with specific implications for a future Scottish parliament. He joined the home affairs team under Roy Hattersley in 1988, was a member of the Labour Review Group to make the legal system more democratic, and was acknowledged as a prime mover in fixing the system of proportional representation (PR) that would later be used for elections to the Scottish parliament.
He was a member of the Plant commission on electoral systems (1990-93), which recommended the introduction of a supplementary vote system for the House of Commons – but which was shelved after the Blair landslide. After leaving government, in 2012 he became chair of the all-party Better Together campaign against independence for Scotland in the 2014 referendum.
In 1992, under the leadership of John Smith, he was switched to the economic portfolio now working closely for the first time with Brown as the shadow chancellor. He was part of Labour’s “prawn cocktail offensive”, lunching in City boardrooms in an attempt to reassure the financial institutions about the party’s plans; he was a member of Labour’s economic commission and was involved in drawing up policies for stakeholding and reforming financial regulations. He became shadow chief secretary to the Treasury in 1996.
Until he became chancellor and found himself in the eye of an unprecedented economic storm, Darling had kept a low public profile. He did not give many interviews, chose not to socialise with colleagues in pursuit of personal promotion, and won himself a name for dull decency. He was voted the most boring MP in 2003, which, it was claimed, he regarded as a personal triumph. The reality was that his character simply did not lend itself to publicity, and his greatest regret during his 30 years in frontline politics was necessarily putting his work before his family.
Darling gained some notoriety when he did come into daily public view, solely on account of his appearance and the startling contrast between his shock of prematurely white hair and black beetle brows. He would say later that he was surprised that the trauma of averting disaster at the height of the economic crisis did not also cause his eyebrows to turn a matching white.
He admitted also to having been scarred by the reaction to an interview he gave to the Guardian in the summer of 2008, ironically in an attempt to redress the lack of public understanding of his character and personality. In the course of the interview he correctly predicted that the coming recession – which subsequent statistics showed had already begun – would be the worst for 60 years. The comment outraged Brown, who unleashed a counter-briefing against his chancellor and subsequently tried unsuccessfully to sack him, failing only because to do so imperilled his own survival as prime minister. Darling wrote of the “attack dogs” of the “inept briefing machine at No 10” and of the “forces of hell” being let loose against him. Unrepentant, he would comment later that he should have said 100 years, rather than 60. In his 2011 memoir Back from the Brink: 1000 Days at No 11, he wrote of his “often troubled relationship” with Brown as neighbours in Downing Street. “Fighting economic and financial fires was the easy bit of the job,” he observed tartly.
Darling retired from politics in 2020, resigning from the House of Lords after only five years, determined to pursue more of his own interests and to make up time with his family.
After an early first marriage, in 1986 he married Maggie McQueen Vaughan, a popular and unpretentious former Glasgow Herald journalist. He is survived by her and their two children, Calum and Anna.
• Alistair Maclean Darling, Lord Darling of Roulanish, politician, born 28 November 1953; died 30 November 2023
• This article was amended on 4 December 2023. The Plant commission on electoral systems recommended the introduction of a supplementary vote system for the House of Commons; an earlier version said it had recommended a proportional representation system.
