With nine months still to go, the battle for Scottish independence is turning nasty, says Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign. And as a veteran of the Blair-Brown wars, the former chancellor knows all about that
Alistair Darling lives in a gracious, rose-tinted house on the Miss Jean Brodie side of Edinburgh. Like him, it is intensely calm and solid. In the kitchen, an unwashed frying pan sits on the stove (the former chancellor is known to like a cooked breakfast). In the loo, a framed copy of the bestseller list from the autumn of 2011 hangs proudly on the wall (his memoir, Back from the Brink: 1,000 Days at No 11, was then sitting efficiently at No 1 in the non-fiction chart).
In the sitting room, a pile of books hopefully awaits his return, and, from the corner of my eye, I consider these titles, hoping that I've stumbled on what's known in politics as a hinterland. But, no. One is Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin; another is Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott. Not exactly light reading. Darling, however, is having none of this. "The Iain Martin is very readable," he yelps, with unmistakably genuine enthusiasm. "It's one of the best books I got last year! Keynes Hayek is a bit more heavy-going, but it's good if you like that sort of thing."
He jumps up, crossing the room to the pile. "But look at this." He returns with a huge coffee-table book, a birthday present from friends (he was 60 last year). It contains exquisite photographs of his beloved Hebrides. "Look at the colours," he says, pointing to a Rothko-esque beach scene. His fingers smooth the shiny pages reverently.
Lewis, where his family has a croft, is Darling's place of safety, you gather, though it takes some probing to get him to articulate this (he is not one for sentiment, and I can no more imagine him indulging in psychobabble than I can see him attending the menswear shows). There, he can stand and gaze at a view that "has not changed in a 1,000 years". All of us need such a place, a landscape we can visit in our mind's eye when things are difficult, but in recent years, Darling has surely required such a balm more than most. First there was that period in a certain flat in Downing Street with its internecine wars (aka "the forces of hell", as he once referred to Gordon Brown's various henchmen), and now there is the battle for Scotland. The latter may sound, on paper, like more of a skirmish than full-blown bloody conflict. But do not be deceived. With just nine months to go until the referendum on independence, things are beginning to turn a little more Game of Thrones.
"It's going to get more unpleasant," says Darling. "You can see it already. You're dealing with something that people have worked towards all their lives, and the stakes will get higher and higher. On the first day of 2014, the CBI general secretary in Scotland put out a press release that questioned various of the SNP's assertions. He was subjected to vile abuse from the nationalists. They went after him. The cyber-nat activity is disgraceful. They will trash anyone who disagrees with them. Their intention is to make people keep their heads down. Salmond could stop it, but he doesn't choose to." Hmm. Does this remind him of anyone? The expression on his face tells me it does.
Darling heads Better Together, an alliance formed by the unionist parties to campaign for a "no" vote. As he's keen to remind me, this coalition is entirely independent from the one comprising the current British government. Nevertheless, on the day I arrive in Scotland, the newspapers are reporting that down in London Cameron and others are thoroughly fed up with it, considering its efforts so far to be "lacklustre". Is this true? And if so, do they have a point?
On the sofa opposite me, Darling adopts the political brace position: back straight, spectacles adjusted, his mouth opening even as I'm finishing my question (happily, his wonderful badger looks mitigate his tendency sometimes to be wearyingly careful in conversation; as he approaches the end of a paragraph, you can just drift off and admire them).
"What I took from David Cameron's comments on The Andrew Marr Show was the mention of 'emotion' [the prime minister insisted that the "emotional arguments" for the union still needed to be articulated]. I believe that this is a campaign you can only win by winning arguments both of the head and the heart, and that they cannot be separated. But it's also the case that this is probably one of the longest campaigns in the history of the world. It's been going on since 2011, when the SNP won the Scottish election," he says.
"People ask: why haven't you had rallies and razzamatazz? But one of the problems for both sides is exhaustion on the part of the electorate. Frankly, people can only take three or four weeks of campaigning, then they want you to go away."
Alex Salmond relishes each and every prime-ministerial intervention, largely because they boost his own narrative, which is built at least in part on open antagonism to the south (it goes like this: why should some Tory in London tell us how to behave?). So is it unhelpful when Cameron pipes up? Darling insists not. The idea that it causes the "no" campaign instantly to haemorrhage votes is purest bunkum. "If you're a tribal nationalist, you don't like David Cameron full stop. But the truth is that polls haven't shifted at all in the last seven years."
A poll commissioned by Better Together to mark the 25th anniversary of John Smith's declaration that devolution was the "settled will" of the Scottish people indicates that the percentage of voters who intend to vote "yes" stands at only 30%, much as it has always done. Do the nationalists still think they can win? "A few years ago, they were saying privately – well, not that privately, as they were telling a succession of journalists – that they had to be at 40% by now."
It's perhaps thanks to such stubbornness in the polls that there are those who consider the No campaign to be something of a cosmetic exercise, a determination on the part of unionists not to look complacent (and thus as a vast waste of time, effort and cash). Darling, though, insists this is a serious business. "No, no!" he says, urgently.
So does he often wake in the middle of the night worrying that Scotland is about to rise up and become a nation again? "I worry every day that it's going to be a lot closer than people think. Drill down, and you realise there is a lot more fluidity in the polls than people think. A million voters are still floating, we believe. If you relax nine months before the polls because it all looks all right, you will lose. The mood can change. You never know when some seismic event is going to occur. The nationalists were 11 points behind in 2011, and they went on to win the election. The mood can change quite suddenly." But isn't the difference that voters then knew they could vote out the SNP in future, whereas independence is for ever? "I've always said it will be close. Those who think it's over bar the shouting are seriously misleading themselves." He worries because he can't think of anything "more negative than simply drawing a line where none exists… I honestly can't understand a person being more willing to express their solidarity with people in Romania than with people in England. I'm as concerned about a child growing up in poverty in Manchester or London as in Scotland."
He is scathing of the SNP's white paper on independence, published last year. "There are 670 pages, and only one has any numbers on it. It tells you that we will be allowed to speak English. It tells you – I'm not joking – that we will enter the Eurovision song contest. But when it comes to the currency, it simply asserts that there will be a union. They simply assert this, even though such a union would mean selling the idea to the UK that Scotland would have a veto over UK tax and spending – and that won't happen. So we do not know what currency we will have.
"It's the same with Europe. The Spanish prime minister and Barroso [José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission] have said Scotland would have to reapply for membership, but still they just assert that we would [automatically] be a member. Salmond was asked if anything at all in the white paper is true – and we might well ask. I doubt they've checked with the people at the Eurovision song contest either. It's a work of fiction."
The white paper is, Darling believes, a way of closing down discussion rather than opening it up. "They won't debate the economy now. Their answer is: it's in the white paper. It's all about emotion now. The argument is that you're not [properly] Scottish unless you're with them. It's an offensive argument, but one they're peddling day in, day out." Darling doesn't "chat" to Salmond. "Of course he's a guy of some ability, but he's never been held up to day-to-day scrutiny, as most other politicians are." For this, perhaps, we must blame the increasingly supine Scottish media.
The economic arguments for the union are relatively straightforward, and centre mostly on strength; Darling is in a better position than most to articulate this, having had to bail out the Scottish banks in 2008. But the emotional arguments are perhaps more difficult to vocalise (it works the other way round for the nationalists, a decent cohort of whom would still want Scotland to be independent as a matter of principle, even if that also meant poorer and weaker). How does Darling see this aspect of the debate? How will he touch the electorate's heart? "[It's about] the country's shared history," he says. "A Welshman created the NHS, an Englishman the welfare state, and a Scotsman built the BBC. It's about big national moments, like the opening of the Olympics." Which sounds pretty vague to me.
For his own part, Darling is exceedingly Scottish, for all that he attended primary school in England. His mother is from Lewis (her mother and grandmother were born in the aforementioned croft), while his father's side are lowlanders (Darling's great-uncle, William Darling, was a Tory MP for Edinburgh South, and his father, an engineer and an elder in the Church of Scotland, voted Conservative until Mrs Thatcher made her speech about society, the non-existence of).
"We weren't a deeply political family," he says, mildly. So where did his politics come from? "There was no great flash, it was more of a gradual realisation when I was at university in the 70s." Did he fit in among all the donkey jackets? (Darling went to Loretto, the Edinburgh public school, and there is something quite urbane at play beneath his stiffness.) "I was pre-donkey-jacket. They weren't until the 1980s."
His political career began in local government as a Lothian councillor – his sometime reputation as a Trot is, incidentally, said to be largely down to Neil Kinnock, who once mistook him for some other bearded lefty – but he insists this was not a sign of early ambition; he would never have stood for parliament at all if the boundaries of Robin Cook's Edinburgh Central constituency had not been redrawn, leaving it a marginal seat (Cook hopped it to Livingston, and though Darling did not stand in 1983, a "chaotic time" for Labour, he did in 1987, and won by 2,000 votes). However, we should give some of the credit to his wife, Margaret, a gregarious former journalist who is surely the major reason why Darling has remained relatively clear-sighted, even modest, in a world where so many descend into paranoia and weirdness. "Maggie said: 'If you don't do it, you'll spend the rest of your life moaning about it and I can't put up with that.' And, well, here I am."
Scottish squalls aside, on this superlative Edinburgh morning, when the sky is the colour of a freshly laundered saltire flag, it must be hard to believe what he put up with during his term as chancellor (to recap: Gordon Brown did not want him in the job, preferring Ed Balls, and tried more than once to fire him; Brown's people also viciously briefed against Darling following an honest but downbeat remark he made about the state of the British economy). Such disgraceful behaviour. Is it hard even to imagine it now? "It's true that time is a great healer," he says. "But I haven't really dwelt on it since."
I find this hard to believe, particularly since history is now in danger of repeating itself; the relationship of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls has the potential, surely, to become every bit as dysfunctional as that of Blair and Brown. He doesn't see it that way. "I honestly don't. I grew up with Gordon and Tony from happy times to increasing unhappiness. I believe people have the ability to learn, and that the two Eds are determined not to do that."
Is it true that when he became Labour leader Miliband tried to persuade Darling to be his shadow chancellor? "No, it's not true." Are they in touch now? "Yes, we had lunch together just before Christmas." Did Miliband ask him to think about returning to the shadow cabinet after the Scottish referendum? "One of Ed's many strengths is that, if I've told him once, he doesn't need to ask me again." The eagle-eyed among you will notice that these two statements appear to contradict one another.
What about the so-called recovery? What does he make of it? "Growth is returning, but it will be two to three years before we're producing what we were in 2008. Europe is not out of the woods yet. They haven't sorted out their banks to the extent that we've done, and I'm very sure the Greek settlement won't work. And how much is it being fuelled by the housing bubble? The risk is another bubble."
The coalition is, he thinks, pretty functional, if only because "if you're in partnership, you have to discuss things with your colleagues, whereas in a single-party government, you don't". So coalition now looks quite tempting to Labour types? (If an interview he gave last week is anything to judge by, Balls is certainly in the process of love-bombing the Liberal Democrats.) "At the moment, it's very difficult to call the next general election." Does he really think it's that close? "Yes, I do. The country is so polarised. The Tories do not have any of the northern cities but, equally, we have no Labour MP in Kent."
How to nose ahead in such an election? It seems to be the way, these days, for former ministers to write tell-all books about what it was like on the inside, and then, once the serialisation cheques have been cashed and the scores settled, to act as if nothing happened: the party that got itself into such a dire state is good to go again, and the electorate should simply forget all the revelations. "If we don't bang on about our record, I can't think who else will," he says. Apparently, he and Brown talk perfectly happily now, though about what he will not say (they last met at the House of Commons shortly before Christmas).
Among the Labour government's greatest achievements, he says, was that child poverty came down, the transport infrastructure was "completely renewed", the NHS was "better funded". What's the thing he most regrets? "The fallout from Iraq. It hasn't only affected most of the British establishment, but now western Iraq, too [a reference to al-Qaida's activities in Falluja]. I voted against intervention in Syria because I could not see how a limited strike would do anything but exacerbate a bad situation. But it would be appalling if the appetite of the outside world were [permanently] affected by what happened in Iraq… If we could wind the clock back to 2002, my guess is that we wouldn't invade Iraq." What does he make of Tony Blair's post-premiership lifestyle, by which I mean mostly all those trips to Kazahkstan? "That's for Tony. I supported him all the way through and, you know…" His voice trails off.
Beyond the referendum, does he still have an appetite for the game of politics? Watching the antics of Blair (or, for that matter, of many of the bankers whose necks he saved in 2008; it is a continuing source of amazement to Darling that so many of these men still have seats in Britain's boardrooms) would be enough to dishearten anyone. And if you've been through the cycle of opposition and government once, would you really want to go through it again?
He insists that he hasn't made a decision yet about whether he will stand as an MP in 2015, and I've no way of telling whether this is the honest truth (Jack Straw, a man who served alongside Darling for the 13 years of Labour government, told me he intended to continue as an MP into old age, and then promptly announced he was standing down). All I can tell you is that he certainly seems to relish work; he is a Protestant to his very marrow, I suppose.
"Even in the dark days, there was never a morning when I didn't want to go into work," he says, with a smile. Outside, the sun continues, somewhat unexpectedly, to shine.
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