​Alistair Darling 1953-2023

​Alistair Maclean Darling, who has died from cancer at the age of 70, achieved high political office while retaining a deep affinity with his mother’s native Lewis and particularly Bernera where there is a family home.

He was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010, earning widespread respect for his handling of the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. In 2014, he chaired the Better Together campaign which successfully defended Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom.

Alistair’s Lewis roots, on his mother’s side, ran deep. He used to say there had not been a year of his life when he did not spend time on the island. In his post-political years, he increasingly aspired to having more time on Bernera, in a place he loved, doing the things he truly enjoyed.

His mother, Anna Darling (née Maclean) was of Bernera and Ness parentage, a Macdonald on her mother’s side, while her father, Kenneth Maclean, was a baker who moved from Ness to Stornoway and was a piper in early days of the Lewis Pipe Band.

The family home was at 73 Keith Street, now demolished, where the Darling children came annually for long summer holidays. By then, it was home to two Maclean siblings who had not married – Alistair’s Uncle Johnny and Aunt Nessie. His grandfather had died in 1949 and his grandmother in 1959 when Alistair was five, though he remembered her a little.

The family nickname, for reasons unknown to the present generation, was “Lux”. Johnny 'Lux' Maclean worked in Stornoway Post Office and was secretary of Lewis Pipe Band from 1948 to 1984. Another aunt, Morag, was married to John Angus Maciver. Both were teachers and lived in Stornoway but John Angus came from Breaclete and Alistair often spent time with his cousins there during the summer holidays. Alistair had three sisters – Jane, Fiona and Katie who survive him.

Fiona, who now lives in Breaclete, recalls: “My mother Anna worked in a bank in Stornoway before she married. She sang in the High Church Choir as well as the Stornoway Gaelic Choir and family lore has it that my father joined the Gaelic choir when he came to work here on the ice plant and that's how they met”.

Sandy Darling was a civil engineer whose work took him around the country. The couple moved to Edinburgh where the family was raised, with Sandy dropping them off in Stornoway for summer holidays and picking them up to return to school. For Alistair, school meant Loretto near Edinburgh, a phase of his life on which he looked back with few fond memories. He proceeded to Aberdeen University to study law and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1984. By then, having been immersed in left-wing politics from his student days, he had also been elected to Lothian Regional Council in 1982.

On the Darling side of the family, there was a long record of public service in Edinburgh though of a different political persuasion. Alistair combined the strong public service gene with a radical political outlook which made him the ideal candidate to gain the Edinburgh Central seat for Labour in 1987, defeating the Tory minister, Alex Fletcher. He remained an MP for the next 28 years; ten of them in opposition, 13 as a Cabinet Minister and then five more in opposition.

Alistair quietly excelled in every office he held and was described by Tony Blair as “the ultimate safe pair of hands”. He was also an avowed non-factionalist, interested only in contributing to the success of Labour governments, who managed to transcend debilitating internal rivalries. When Blair stood down as Prime Minister in 2007, Alistair was the rational choice to replace Gordon Brown as Chancellor.

He was scarcely across the Treasury threshold before the financial crisis started to manifest itself with the impending collapse of Northern Rock and the next two years were, for Alistair, extraordinary times fending off mass unemployment and global economic collapse. He later told the story in a frank and excellent book, “Back from the Brink”.

Its most-told anecdote involved a conversation with the chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Tom McKillop, “who told me that his bank is going to go bust this afternoon and asked me what we are going to do about it”. The answer was that they nationalised it. For his calm handling of this and every other aspect of the financial crisis, Alistair won near-universal plaudits as reflected in the tributes paid since his death.

Inevitably, his honesty was not to everyone’s liking, particularly when he gave an interview to the Guardian, conducted in Breaclete with Murdo Macleod as photographer, which was headed “Economy at a 60 Year Low, says Darling”. He had actually said the same thing that summer of 2008 in an interview with the Stornoway Gazette which, understandably, attracted less attention. This was different and “the forces of hell” were unleashed against him from Gordon Brown’s office. Alistair survived the attempts to replace him.

Brown lost the General Election in 2010 and Alistair had little enthusiasm for another spell in opposition. However, when David Cameron agreed in 2012 to a Scottish referendum, he became the obvious leader of a cross-party campaign in which economic arguments were critical. It was a role he neither sought nor relished and was saddened by the divisions it created. Again, he did the job effectively, notably in a critical TV debate with Alex Salmond.

Throughout his career, Alistair was liked and respected by those who worked for him, including his civil servants at all levels. This was a mark of a man who was kind and considerate in his personal conduct as well as being great company in private with an acerbic sense of humour, particularly in his political commentary and character assessments.

In 2015, he went to the House of Lords as Baron Darling of Roulanish, Great Bernera, in the County of Ross and Cromarty. This was against his better judgement and experience confirmed it was not an environment he enjoyed. He resigned from the Lords in 2020.

Alistair married Maggie Vaughan, a journalist and kindred spirit, in 1986 and she was critical to everything he did in his political career as well as being a formidable force for good in her own right. She survives him with their two children, Calum and Anna, to whom he was devoted and who have inherited his own love of Bernera which grew stronger with the years.

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