Alistair Darling

PRIVATE EYE 1218 page 5
WHILE Alistair Darling's forthright assessment of the economy has made the headlines, no attention has been paid to the Chancellor's equally remarkable comments on his own political history in the same Guardian interview. As a student in the early 1970s, he claims, he had no political leanings. He ran for the student union presidency at Aberdeen University on a non-party ticket — "strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory". After graduation he trained as a lawyer in Edinburgh, joining the Labour Party at the age of 23 in 1977.

Why Labour? "Just... I suppose, overall, I thought the Tories were unfair... The Labour Party just seemed to reflect my outlook on life -you know, that we were better working together -fairness, helping everyone to get on." But he was "never interested in the theory", just the practicality of doing things. This political self-portrait has caused amusement among old Edinburgh comrades who remember Darling from the mid-1970s, in the years before he joined Labour, as a keen supporter of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International.
They are also puzzled by his claim that he was always a mild-mannered pragmatist. In fact, as a member of Lothian regional council in the 1980s he was a local-government leftie after the style of Ted Knight in Lambeth and Derek Hatton in Liverpool, sometimes imposing massive rate rises in defiance of Thatcher's rate-capping laws, sometimes threatening not to set a rate at all and to drag the council into bankruptcy. (Neil Kinnock referred to him as "that bearded Trot".)
When George Galloway was sent by Scottish Labour to plead with Red Ally, pointing out that the consequences of his defiance would be mass sackings of council staff and sequestration or jail for Darling and his chums, the future Chancellor denounced Gorgeous George as a "reformist" (sic). Has all this really slipped his memory?