Darling Won't Be Moving Over

I know that we are related, but I have never met him, and I am as critical as anyone of the takeover of the Labour Party by people with such unrecanted backgrounds as, in his case, the International Marxist Group. But for all the jokes about his reward for 30 years of ironing Gordon Brown's shirts and polishing his shoes, there are only three people who have been in the Cabinet continuously since 1997. One is Brown himself. Another is Jack Straw, also no mean master of the darker political arts. And the third is Alistair Darling. Add in that he was right all along about the recession. All in all, not a man either to write off or to underestimate.