A politician happy in his own skin

Alistair Darling’s Back from the Brink is not just a compulsive read: it is an essential primer for anyone with aspirations to be Prime Minister or Chancellor. It’s not unlike the manual in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with ‘Don’t Panic’ emblazoned on the front.

The glory of this book is that, unlike Mandelson’s bitch fest of self-congratulation, malice and poison towards anyone who was not in total awe of The Presence, Darling comes out of it all as an unlikely hero. There is not the dull scrape, as there is in most political memoirs, of a large case being dragged across the floor where a trumpet is lovingly removed and blown at every opportunity.

It has been far too easy for reviewers just to concentrate on the purple passages and forget about the central problems of the Blair and Brown eras, their mutual and self- destructive hatred, the collapse of cabinet government, the sidelining of officials, making policies on the hoof and a total lack of understanding of the grave that the banks were digging.