Whether you saw Alistair Darling’s comments to the Guardian journalist he took on holiday as a foolhardy gaffe or a calculated broadside fired across Brown’s battered bows might depend on your politics, but loose lips still sink ships. And Brown isn’t the only one cursing the chancellor’s forthrightness.
I’m off on a break of my own later in the week, and thanks to those few unguarded moments in Darling’s cosy Scottish holiday croft, this journalist’s few days in the South of France are likely to be decidedly pricey; the pound hit an all time low against the Euro on Monday, fuelled by the Chancellor’s warning that conditions are “arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”.
Who takes a journalist on holiday with them anyway? My partner hasn’t got much choice, but her comments aren’t likely to have much impact on international currency fluctuations or the general outlook for the economy. My guess is that Darling’s frank language was deliberately at odds with the cautious economic tone consistently adopted by Brown.
He’s not harbouring any ambitions for power, so what’s he up to? Pushing for a reassessment of his damaged reputation before it’s too late, perhaps. If you’re looking to point the finger somewhere, the current mess can be attributed to Brown’s mistakes, both as chancellor and prime minister, Darling seems to be suggesting. Belatedly, he’s responding to everyone’s first instinct when the new job isn’t going as well as you'd hoped – he’s blaming the last bloke.
Ironically, the comments seem to be doing plenty of damage in their own right. Yet Darling’s warning that the slump will be “more profound and long-lasting than people thought” could be prescient if the 1970s are anything to go by. Those old enough to cast their minds back to 1972 will recall a three day week, three million unemployed and coal and electricity shortages that meant we couldn’t keep the lights on. But it would take another four years for our justifiable castigation as the ‘sick man of Europe’ to reach its nadir, when chancellor Dennis Healy went cap in hand to the IMF, an institution which traditionally lends money to third world countries.
If these are the worst conditions we’ve seen in 60 years, entrepreneurs are a welcome differentiator from previous black spots. Searching for a bright note on the business pages is an increasingly fruitless task these days, so I was pleased to find research which suggested 90% of entrepreneurs would dust themselves down and try again if their existing business went under. Remarkably, a significant majority of the 500 small business owners surveyed said they would view a failure as a ‘positive experience’.
The average respondent would take just four months to get back in business, the research from Barclays found, and while most conceded that any business failure is a bitter blow, three quarters reported that they would be less likely to make the same mistakes second time around. In the 70s, most people didn’t even know what an entrepreneur was. Now, they’re defining the spirit that could help us avoid another lengthy spell on Europe’s sick bed.
