Minister lifts lid on former British PM’s ‘brutal regime’
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown ran a “brutal regime” that back-stabbed colleagues in “hellish” attacks, his finance minister Alistair Darling says in a new book.
In extracts from his memoirs serialised in the Sunday Times newspaper, Mr Darling said Mr Brown ruled with a “permanent air of chaos and crisis” and serially undermined him by thwarting his budget plans and unleashing “attack dogs”.
In Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11, Mr Darling describes his time at the Treasury throughout Mr Brown’s premiership from June 2007 to May 2010, chronicling the economic crisis.
Mr Darling said he was “clearly a stopgap appointment” before appointing Ed Balls, a Brown protege who is now Labour’s finance spokesman. But when Mr Brown tried to oust Mr Darling in May 2009, the chancellor refused to be “trashed and sacrificed”.
Just before the banking crash in 2008, Mr Brown was convinced the economic downturn would only last six months and was furious with Mr Darling for accurately describing the outlook as the worst for 60 years.
“Those were dark days,” Mr Darling said.
“If I had known that Gordon believed that economic recovery lay around the corner – if he’d told me, his chancellor, this – then we could have had a discussion about it.
“The problem was that clearly he did not trust my advice, and now he appeared indifferent to what I thought.”
