The referendum scars have healed... I’m supremely relaxed
A year on, Alistair Darling – reluctant hero of the No vote – reveals his wife was his secret weapon in the battle to save the Union... and now that it’s all over, he is delighted to be out of a job
ONE year ago today, Alistair Darling woke up with absolutely nothing to do. Admittedly the head of the Better Together campaign hadn’t had much sleep, but he never could go to bed on election nights – and the independence referendum, which he had been tasked with nursing to a No victory, was no exception.
But on that morning, for the first time in two and a half years, Mr Darling could relax. He could have breakfast with his wife Margaret. He could perhaps do the crossword, or spend an hour or two in the back garden, and not have to worry about how to save the Union.
A year on, rarely has a man looked so relieved to be out of a job. Today, having stood down as an MP six months after the referendum, Mr Darling has skin the sort of mahogany shade that suggests a summer spent in foreign climes. He has plenty of time for a cup of tea in a smart Edinburgh café near his home, and his big appointment of the day is a haircut.
‘The last six months have been supremely relaxing,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing like not having to go to London on Mondays. Apart from the rubbish weather – I had a dream about being able to sit outside and soak up the summer in Scotland, but that’s been dashed.’ Mr Darling never wanted the Better Together job. He was comfortable on the back benches, still recovering from a bruising reign as Chancellor under Gordon Brown during the banking crisis, and found himself taking on the role in early 2012 almost by default.
‘It became clear to me that nothing was happening, and I just remember saying to Margaret one day: “This is a classic case of if you want something doing, you have to do it yourself’. If somebody else were doing it, or had volunteered to do it, or my own party was going to really assert itself, I would have been more than happy.
‘I would certainly have pitched in, but I had decided in 2010, havingg been in government for 13 years, that I didn’t want to come back intoo the frontline. I was writing my book, I was happy. I hadn’t quite bargained on my entire life being taken over for two and a half years.’
For many, he was a surprising g choice. The soft-spoken, sometimess dour former Chancellor with the shock of white hair and the startling black eyebrows (venture into thee Mumsnet thread on the subject att your peril) was hardly the charis-- matic orator one might have expected to take on Alex Salmond in the battle for the Union. As he admits himself: ‘I don’t excite people generally.’
Yet – and he does rather bang on about this, complaining that no one else does – Better Together won, and by a whopping ten points.
He remembers clearly how the realisation set in: ‘We were camped out in a hotel in Glasgow and everybody said “go to bed”, but I’ve never been able to go to bed on election nights, so I stayed up to watch. When places like Midlothian, places with a real nationalist presence, voted No, we realised we would win. So it was a feeling of elation, I felt vindicated.’
He is hugely frustrated with David Cameron’s behaviour in the immediate aftermath, and recalls a phone call with the Prime Minister in the early hours of September 19: ‘It was about 6am, once the results were clear. He’d phoned me as a formality, but I’d got wind of what he was going to do in his speech that morning – talk about English votes for English laws – and I said: “I understand the problem you have with Tories, but if you do this today you will let Salmond straight back in the front door. After two and a half years, why do you want to do that?”
‘It immediately provided another grievance and took away the attention from the fact that Scotland had voted to stay in the Union.
‘One of the many regrets I have is that afterwards the three political parties that believed we should stay in the UK didn’t capitalise on the win. If you win in politics, you have to keep working at it. You can’t just say: “Well, thanks very much, we’ll see you again in five years.”’
Asked to identify a low point in the campaign, he recalls a morning early in 2013 when he woke up feeling miserable: ‘I thought: “There’s almost two years of this to go.” I used to joke that a Scot can put up with a six-week election campaign, even though it’s probably five weeks too long, but two and a half years? It was incessant. It just went on, and on, and on. And the arguments didn’t really change.’
In the last few months running up to September 2014, Mr Darling received a lot of personal attacks in the press, much of it from disgruntled col- leagues elsewhere in Better Together. He says he knew there were leaks, by those who thought he was bungling the job and briefing against him.
‘It’s not too difficult to work out where these things come from. And it was coming from Westminster rather than up here. Sometimes you’d get a Tory MP coming up and saying: “Why aren’t you making more of our heritage and the First World War?” And you’d have to say: “Look, that is not modern Scotland – you’re quoting things people don’t relate to.’”
On those who briefed against him, he says: ‘I’m pretty sure I know who one of these people was. You’d get the expat brigade – they think they know Scotland, and in some cases they own bits of it, so they think they understand how we all think.’
He claims he never considered resignation, although it was suggested he was almost pushed to it following a particularly bruising Scottish Daily Mail front page that revealed the campaign was in crisis.
‘I expressed exasperation with people. It’s troubling, and nobody likes seeing those things written about themselves. But by that stage, there was no way I was going to stand aside, having spent the previous two years doing the job. I wasn’t going to watch someone else cross the finish line.’
Yet he admits there was a personal toll: ‘When you pick up newspapers and every single one of them is saying how awful you are, I think most people are affected by that sort of thing.
‘It was a feeling of elation, I felt vindicated’ ‘Do this and you will let Salmond straight back in’
‘If you lose one, you live to fight another day’
But then there comes a point where you just have the determination to see it through. If you run away, or have a thin skin, politics is probably the wrong place for you.’
He pauses to reflect: ‘Now that it’s after the referendum, a lot of the scars, like any other scars, they’ve gone away. There’s nothing so deep-seated I still worry about it.’
He credits much of his ability to stick at it to his wife of 29 years. A former journalist known to others as Maggie Vaughan, with a delightfully indiscreet Twitter account, mainly on the subject of politics and Unionism, she played an active role behind the scenes during the campaign, providing the black pudding rolls during early morning meetings at the Darlings’ home in Edinburgh and keeping her husband going when the brickbats were flying.
‘She always has played that active role,’ he says. ‘I would have found it difficult during the banking crisis to cope with all that if she hadn’t been living down in London with me, so that at least you could pop in for ten minutes for a chat.
‘She does quite a lot of things behind the scenes. We’ve been very happy for the last 30 years.’ He is concerned, and still shocked, about how much Scotland has changed politically since the referendum: ‘If you look at the General Election in May, you can see the country is just split down the middle. One of the things that I am deeply worried about is the fact that it’s so split.
‘I don’t criticise anyone for having strong views on either side of this argument, but at some point Scotland has to come together. And there’s almost a demonising of peo- ple who are against independence, saying somehow “you’re against Scotland”. I think that’s deeply worrying and it’s not something that’s easily repaired. Whatever happens, we’re going to have to live together. I worry about it.
‘Many people wrongly believed that once we had the referendum, if the No side won, the nationalists would go away. But nationalism will not go away.’
He suspects another referendum will happen (‘I won’t be taking a frontline role,’ he adds quickly), but believes it might not be for a while: ‘My hunch is that Nicola Sturgeon won’t go for it unless she’s absolutely certain she can win it. She’s not certain yet. If you lose one, you live to fight another day. You lose two, and it’s terribly difficult to say let’s have another crack at it.
‘You can never say never for anything, but I don’t think they’re in any hurry to have one. But who knows what will happen in the UK as a whole? I’ve always said to people: “You take a hell of a lot for granted. A l ot hangs in t he balance.”’
Mr Darling decided he was standing down as an MP long before the referendum vote. He always knew that Better Together was his last waltz in the limelight, and was clear in his own mind that he ‘just didn’t want to do politics any more’. He recalls: ‘One of the things I wondered about was standing down on the morning of the referendum. But I thought no, it would distract attention from the main event.’
In the past six months, he has been doing bits and pieces. He reveals he’s on ‘some group’ reviewing how ATM bank machines are run across the country, ‘It sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry, but actually some of the nuts and bolts of it are quite interesting,’ he says.
His eyes flash with the sort of enthusiasm that betrays his onetime moniker of the most boring politician in Britain, as he adds: ‘I’m only 61, so I’m not quite ready for a gold watch and a seat beside the fire. My wife has made that quite clear. That’s not an option.’
Yet he’s still reconciling himself to his new role. In August, he was given a life peerage. When I congratulate him, the one-time Marxist l ooks as t hough he has swallowed a lemon.
‘The reason I accepted it is that I’d still like to be able to contribute to public life and the economy,’ he says, a touch petulant. ‘You can’t be in public life for most of your adult life and then say: “I don’t want to know about it any more.” I just don’t want to do it full time.’
It seems there is something of a conflict between the man who still wants to be in the thick of it all, and the man who enjoys sitting in his back garden.
The other day, he received a letter – ‘a very nice letter’ is all he will say – from his former enemy Gordon Brown, another Scottish politician who has disappeared from public life after years of difficult headlines. So now, despite the insults, the abuse, the disappointments and the sleepless nights, is Alistair Darling glad he took the Better Together job?
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I’d have felt terrible if I hadn’t done anything. I’d have felt even worse if I hadn’t done anything and we had lost. Because it’s not one of those things where you can come back and say “we’ll have a try next time”. There isn’t a next time.
‘Of course it was hard work, and it wasn’t something I sought out or was desperate to do, but at some stage in my life I’ll look back and, of course, I won’t regret it.
‘It’s funny how time goes by so quickly,’ he muses. ‘It doesn’t seem l i ke a year. But maybe that’s because I’m getting old.’