“Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian carried an interview Alistair Darling in which he warned that the economic cataclysm which was just starting to engulf us would be “arguably the worst in 60 years”. How we jeered, how the accusations of gaffe and blunder were hurled at the poor fellow. We learned that Gordon Brown was infuriated by the Chancellor’s candour - Mr Brown being a politician who has never done candour - and the air was thick with speculation that Darling’s days were numbered. But of course he was right, bang on the money”
avers David Hughes in The Daily Telegraph today.
That is not how I remember it. I recall that HM Government was playing down how serious an economic mess it had caused, and the Chancellor’s gaffe was to have let the cat out of the bag, rather than to have told us something that neither the Government nor we then knew. Whilst Darling was right in his assessment of the state of the economy, so was everyone else who predicted that we were in danger of suffering potentially the most serious recession in fifty years, if not a century.
I have noticed how this story of Alistair Darling being an all-seeing prophet concerning the economy has gained ground during the course of the mainstream media’s silly season. Even if the Chancellor had been uniquely prescient as is now (falsely) claimed, he does not deserve any credit in the light of his almost immediate “clarifying” of what he had told The Guardian as reported in the The Daily Telegraph the following day, 31st August 2008.