Britain was lucky to have Alistair Darling
NS says There was a kind of grim symmetry. As the inquiry into the Covid pandemic turned its attention to Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson, the death was announced of a very different figure, who had steered Britain through a very different crisis – though one almost as serious.
It is hard to imagine a politician more different from the performative, self-indulgent antics of Johnson’s Downing Street than Alistair Darling. Here was a man who listened intently, respected experts and institutions, but who brought a bracing dose of scepticism to every conversation.
In public he could seem dryly austere. In private he had a biting, sardonic wit. His wife Maggie, a warm and gregarious working-class Scottish journalist, kept a table overflowing with food and laughter which became an essential stopping off place for anyone in the know passing through Edinburgh.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2023/11/britain-was-lucky-to-have-alistair-darling