The weakest Chancellor

John Rentoul comments on a "dull, intellectually soft Budget, in which the main interest lay in the secondary cast of characters". That's true. The oddity of this Budget is that one of those secondary characters was the man delivering the Budget speech.

Alastair Darling is not the worst Chancellor since the war - that would be Anthony Barber, who in the words of the late Edmund Dell held the post "in little more than name [and] bequeathed to his successor a total breakdown in economic management". But he is the weakest. No Chancellor that I can think of was more obviously lacking his own authority and dependent on the Prime Minister's.

In the sterling crisis of 1976, Denis Healey depended on the support of James Callaghan to secure Cabinet approval of the terms of the IMF standby loan. But he also plainly won the argument in Cabinet against the protectionist proposals of Tony Benn and (less absurdly) Tony Crosland. He was a strong Chancellor with a weak hand, and dealt it skilfully. Norman Lamont's pursuit of a doomed exchange rate target destroyed his own credibility and that of John Major's government. But Lamont was in this with the rest of the government. After the ERM debacle, he in fact followed a sensible and successful course. Lamont's political views are extreme and objectionable, but the monetary framework he put in place was one that Labour rightly built on and ought to have pursued before. (In the inter-war years, and especially the early 1930s, price stability as an alternative to the Gold Standard was a view with some influence in the Labour Party. This was, for example, the view of Ernest Bevin, who had served with Keynes on the Macmillan Committee on Currency and Finance.)

Darling is unlike anyone else. He's a weak Chancellor dominated by the PM and the PM's record. He holds office in a dysfunctional government that contains few people of real talent. (This has been a problem throughout Labour's term of office. Outside the highest offices of state, there have been not many ministerial successes and very many who were plainly not competent. I have nothing against the man, but recall Gavin Strang - if you can.) The future is not bright.

Comments

[Matthew]

Then again, he faces the stupidest and least impressive Shadow Chancellor I can recall, and probably compared with those I can't recall, which admittedly is all of William Hague's and IDS's.

[tolkein]

Brown and the Government would be better served by an independent Chancellor. I think Alistair is competent but he just looks like Gordon's sock puppet.

[Recusant]

"Lamont's political views are extreme and objectionable".

Is that another, and slightly more hyperbolic, way of saying you disagree with them?

[peter]

Well, I have to agree with you on Norman Lamont. That a British parliamentarian would defend the vile Augusto Pinochet Ugarte beggars belief. Does Mr Lamont think that the violent overthrow of a constitutionally-elected government is right and proper always, or only when it happens in other countries? In either case, one recoils from the thought that a person with such beliefs as Lamont revealed himself to endorse would ever have held elective office in Britain.

[Ian C]

Darling is probably perfectly competent - he has never given an imprssion of incompetence until caught up in the non-election last October. No, his problem is what Borwon has been doing for the past 10 years and Darling can do nothing about it but sit at his desk, wait and watch. A bit like the rest of us as the worst financial crisis since the 1970's unfolds. An it is unfolding partly because of what Gordon did and did not do in his time at the Treasury. Darling cannot do anything because Brown has left the cupboard bare.