Alistair Darling
The Rt. Hon. Alistair Darling, M.P.Alistair Maclean Darling MP, (born November 28, 1953) is a British politician. He is the Labour Party Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South West in Scotland, and is Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.
Alistair Darling was born in London, England and educated at Loretto School, Musselburgh, East Lothian, before attending the University of Aberdeen where he was awarded a Bachelor of Laws (LLB). He became a solicitor in 1978, rising to become an advocate since 1984.
He was elected as a councillor to the Lothian Regional Council in 1982 and served until he was elected to parliament. He was also a board member for the Lothian and Borders Police. He was a governor of Napier College in 1985 for two years.
He entered Parliament at the 1987 General Election in Edinburgh Central defeating the sitting Conservative MP Alex Fletcher by 2,262, and has remained an MP since. As a backbencher he sponsored the Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1988. He soon became an Opposition Home Affairs spokesman in 1988 on the frontbench of Neil Kinnock. After the 1992 General Election became a spokesman on Treasury Affairs until being promoted to the Tony Blair Shadow Cabinet as the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1996. Following the 1997 General Election he entered Cabinet as the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. He became a Member of the Privy Council on entering Cabinet. In 1998 he was made the Secretary of State for Social Security replacing Harriet Harman who had been dismissed.
After the 2001 General Election, the department for Social Security was abolished and replaced with the new Department for Work and Pensions, which also took employment away from the education portfolio, Darling headed the new department until 2002 when he was transferred to the Department of Transport, in the wake of his predecessor Stephen Byers resigning after a great deal of criticism. Darling was given a brief to "take the department out of the headlines" and was widely considered to have achieved this. After the Scottish Office was folded into the Department for Constitutional Affairs, he was made Scottish Secretary in combination with his transport portfolio in 2003. In the Cabinet reshuffle of May 2006, he was promoted to his current position of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry; Douglas Alexander replaced him as both Secretary of State for Transport and Secretary of State for Scotland.
He is the great nephew of Sir William Darling who was Conservative MP for Edinburgh South (1945-1957). He has been married to Margaret McQueen Vaughan since 1986 and they have a son and a daughter. After the creation of the Scottish Parliament the number of Scottish seats at Westminster was reduced, his Edinburgh Central seat was abolished and since 2005 he has represented the new seat of Edinburgh South West.
See also
Donald Dewar
Jack McConnell
John Smith
Tony Blair
Henry McLeish
Gordon Brown
John Reid