Britannia Radio

While Andrew Pierce's description of Darling is spot on as far as it 
goes,  he misses the logical next point.  Given that Darling is being 
subjected to ritual humiliation every day by his master, why does he 
put up with it?

He could escape and help his country at the same time by resigning 
and saying exactly why .  Brown could not survive such an attack and 
an election would have to follow.   He must know that Brown has made 
the Labour party unelectable so his party would not long condemn him 
either.

Every day  and every action by Brown makes the present worse and the 
future unendurable.  So the mere absence of Brown would improve 
things!   So the Tories would take over - even Brown's description of 
them as "the do-nothing party" sounds like blessed relief.  In fact 
their economic grasp improves all the time and - as I say- anything-
but-Brown would improve matters.

So what are you waiting for Mr Darling.  Save our country!

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TELEGRAPH  28.2.09
Is time up for the accidental Chancellor?
Isolated and lacklustre, Alistair Darling is surely doomed, says 
Andrew Pierce

By Andrew Pierce

As the crisis in the banking system continues to engulf the 
Government, Alistair Darling has confided to his close friends that 
he has two recurring nightmares that increasingly keep him awake at 
night. The first is that the successive bailouts of the banks will 
not work, plunging Britain into deep depression rather than 
recession. The second is that he will go down in history as the worst 
chancellor we have ever had.

It is too early to say whether the Asset Protection Scheme unveiled 
by Mr Darling in the Commons on Thursday will finally kick start 
lending by the banks. But what is clear is that Mr Darling has 
already been written off not just by the voters as the most 
incompetent politician ever to occupy 11 Downing Street but also by 
many MPs on his own backbenches.

He looks increasingly like the accidental Chancellor, with some 
likening him to Chauncey Gardiner, the simple gardener in the Peter 
Sellers masterpiece Being There who rose to prominence as an unlikely 
presidential adviser oblivious to the true ways of the world.

As a result, the Chancellor's confidence has been drained and his 
performance in the Commons on Thursday was halting and lacklustre. As 
he slumped back in his front-bench seat Vince Cable, the Lib Dem 
treasury spokesman, cut to the quick when he talked of "this zombie 
Government, the walking dead".

Indeed, Mr Darling has the haunted look of a dead man walking, out of 
his depth, cut off from the big decisions of the banking sector by Mr 
Brown and his ministerial chums from the City.

Ironically, it was because Mr Darling was regarded as a boring but 
safe pair of hands that he was installed in the Treasury after Mr 
Brown's move to 10 Downing Street. Mr Darling, along with Jack Straw, 
the Justice Secretary, is the only survivor of Tony Blair's first 
Cabinet, formed in the heady days of May 1997 when things could only 
get better.

Yet despite being Chief Secretary to the Treasury, running Social 
Security, Work and Pensions, he had virtually no public profile. 
Unusually for a politician, he never courted headlines. "If you're 
not writing about me, I take that as a compliment," he would say.

But that all changed after the collapse of Northern Rock, and again 
in the last week, when he has been in the firing line over the 
extraordinary £690,000-a-year pension trousered by Sir Fred Goodwin, 
the man who steered the Royal Bank of Scotland to collapse.

Inexplicably, the Chancellor admitted that he found out about the 
terms of the pension deal for his Edinburgh neighbour only last week. 
Yet, as custodian of the nation's finances, he had a duty to protect 
the interests of the long-suffering taxpayer.

The row over the pension has provoked a public furore which could 
prove fatal to Mr Darling, reinforcing as it does the impression that 
he is at the mercy of events, not in control of them. It will also 
push him ever closer to the foot of the league table of notoriety of 
modern-day chancellors.

In fact, the bad dreams about his standing started last November when 
he became the chancellor with the worst economic forecasting and 
borrowing record in modern history. In that month's pre-Budget 
report, he had to make the largest cut to UK growth forecasts since 
the projections began in the 1970s.

In fairness to the Chancellor, his friends (he has some left) argue 
that even if he had asked about the Goodwin package he would probably 
have been rebuffed. It's an open secret in Whitehall that he has been 
kept out of the loop on the big banking decisions by a prime minister 
who defers to the Square Mile in the form of Lord Myners, the City 
minister, Baroness Vadera, the trade minister, and Lord Mandelson.

As Kenneth Clarke, the new shadow business secretary, put it: 
"Alistair Darling could be quite a good chancellor, if Gordon ever 
gave him the job."  John Kingman, the head of UK Financial 
Investments, set up by the government to manage the new state-owned 
banking assets, reports directly to Mr Brown, not the Chancellor, 
which underlines his sense that he has been isolated.

When Mr Darling was in the relative backwater of social security and 
transport,  his strategy was to "keep the lid" on problems. But two 
people persuaded him to change course: his wife Maggie, a former 
journalist, and Catherine Macleod, an old friend and former political 
editor of the Glasgow-based newspaper the Herald, who became his 
special adviser in December 2007. They pressed him to tackle his 
"grey man" image.

They were both present when Mr Darling talked to a Guardian 
journalist over two days during the summer at his family's croft in 
the Outer Hebrides. His aim was to give a portrait of himself - not, 
as has been widely thought since, to avoid being cast as the 
scapegoat for Gordon Brown.

He certainly raised his profile. In his interview, in between fishing 
trips, he warned that the British economy was facing its worse crisis 
in "60 years". The result? Another plunge in the value of sterling 
and shares just as the Labour conference was about to begin. Mr 
Darling had broken the golden rule that chancellors are not supposed 
to talk the economy down; they are supposed to show caution, not 
candour.

Downing Street, predictably, briefed (again) against Mr Darling but 
it seems his remarks were, in fact, prescient. Only two weeks ago Ed 
Balls, the Schools Secretary and his likely successor, predicted that 
the recession would be the deepest for 100 years.

Within weeks of the 60-year gaffe, Darling appeared once more to be 
like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He had bizarrely called the 
big three British banks into the Treasury, after Lehman Brothers went 
bankrupt, but gave them nothing other than tea and sympathy. To the 
astonishment of the City there was no rescue strategy, which meant 
that the banks took another hammering when the markets opened. The 
Royal Bank of Scotland lost more than a third of its share value.

Kenneth Clarke, as usual, summed up the malaise when he said: "The 
Government is simply incapable of responding to the speed of events." 
He was right. It is no coincidence that the emergency meeting to 
agree a bank recapitalisation plan was thrashed out days later by the 
Prime Minister.

Mr Brown, who famously dithered over the timing of a general 
election, is now running out of time. At the height of the Suez 
Crisis, more than 50 years ago, The Daily Telegraph admonished 
Anthony Eden with the words: "The country is waiting to feel the 
smack of firm government.'' The phrase has never been more apposite 
today. The British people have no confidence in this semi-detached 
Chancellor who has blundered and fumbled from the outset of the 
crisis. Perhaps it's time for him to go.