Abstract

This paper will discuss HM Treasury’s management of the Financial Crisis of 2008. Under normal circumstances, historians would have to wait at least two decades before gaining access to the files that capture this momentous history. It is significant, therefore, that this paper, and the doctoral thesis it draws upon, has benefited from unique early access to the Treasury records on the crisis. These have been rigorously analysed alongside some of the first on-the-record interviews with key past and present officials to present the first dispassionate account of how Her Majesty’s Treasury, under the Chancellorship of Alistair Darling, managed the Financial Crisis between 2007 and 2009. In the retellings of the Financial Crisis, there has been a tendency to present it as a series of escalating, somewhat predictable, events. This paper reveals a different reality, shedding light on the deep and persisting sense of uncertainty which threatened the Treasury’s ability to respond, the wider challenges faced by the UK authorities and how these were, or were not, overcome.