Alistair Darling, the British lawmaker and minister who played a leading role in his country’s response to the 2008 global financial crisis, rescuing ailing banks with massive injections of public money that averted a wider economic collapse, died Thursday in an Edinburgh hospital. . He was 70 years old.
His family said the cause was cancer.
Darling joked that posthumous eulogies would describe him as a steady enabler in the credit crisis that began in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US, and which sent shock waves through the world’s banks.
The comment was about money. In an obituary on Thursday, the BBC said Mr Darling had become “known as the steady man who nursed the UK economy when half its banking system collapsed”, pointing to his moves to bail out British banking giants, particularly the Royal Bank of Scotland. .
Just before the crisis, in 2007, Gordon Brown, Britain’s Labor prime minister at the time, promoted Mr. Darling to Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most senior government official responsible for the country’s finances. Until then, Mr Darling had held a series of government posts at the Treasury and in departments dealing with social care, pensions, trade and transport.
“In times of crisis, Alistair was the person you wanted in the room because he was calm, he was considerate and he had a lot of integrity,” Mr Brown said.
This statement contradicts Mr. Darling’s assessment of Mr. Brown’s management. In his autobiography published after Labour’s defeat in 2010, Mr Darling said there had been a “perpetual atmosphere of chaos and crisis” in Mr Brown’s administration.
The global crisis has left deep economic scars. “My initial reaction must have been somewhat like that of the captain of the Titanic when the ship’s engineer told him it would sink within two hours,” Darling wrote. “There were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers.”
Britain’s banking problems began with a run on cash from the regional Northern Rock Bank, a frenzy that officials sought to counter with infusions of government funds.
Even then, economic conditions in Britain were “arguably the worst in 60 years,” Mr. Darling said in a newspaper interview, and the distress was going to be “much deeper and more lasting than people thought.” His comments sparked howls of protest from Mr. Brown’s supporters.
As the crisis unfolded, Darling later said in a radio interview that the “scariest” moment for him came one morning in the crisis when a senior Royal Bank of Scotland executive told him that the bank was going to run out of money dramatically. In the afternoon – an almost unimaginable prospect for a financial institution that ranks among the largest in the world.
“What was going through my mind at that point was that if people thought the biggest bank in the world had gone bankrupt, no bank in the Western world would be safe,” he said.
Mr. Darling won widespread acclaim for his handling of the crisis. But his subsequent political career was marked by a row with Brown over post-crisis spending, with Darling seeking to impose some sort of restraint. In this case, Labor was voted out of office in 2010, and moved into opposition.
Mr Darling has broken ground on bipartisan support 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, who was ennobled in 2015 as Baron Darling of Rowlanish and became a member of the House of Lords, ran an unsuccessful campaign opposing Brexit. He retired from that Supreme Council in 2020.
Alistair MacLean Darling was born on November 28, 1953 in London. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas and Anna (McLean) 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 a decade later.
In 1986, he married journalist Margaret Vaughan, and they had two children, Callum and Anna.
Labor won a landslide victory under Mr Blair in 1997, and Mr Darling became associated with the so-called New Labor reformist wing of the party grouped around Mr Blair. He had a dry wit and a reputation that Brian Wilson, a former Labor minister, described as a “good moral and political compass,” his former colleagues said on Thursday.
But surprisingly, his political opponents in the Conservative government paid extraordinary tribute. Jeremy Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, said Darling was “one of the great advisers”, adding that he did “the right thing for the country at a time of extraordinary turmoil”.