How Decca got her Darling scoop

Did Alistair Darling intend to shake the foundations of Westminster with his interview in the Guardian on Saturday, in which he warned that Britain was facing its worst economic crisis in 60 years? Or was it a careless aside?

The writer who got the scoop was Decca Aitkenhead of the Guardian and today she followed it up with an article suggesting that the setting for her interview - the Darlings' holiday home on the Isle of Lewis in the Orkneys - may have played a part in his outspokenness.

"Darling's remote croft feels a universe away from Westminster, and the interview took place on sofas in front of an open peat fire, with his wife cooking lunch next door," Aitkenhead writes.

"They didn't even record the interview on their own tape recorder. It feels pretty inconceivable that he would have said what he did from behind his desk in the Treasury - but after a day we'd spent out on his boat and on the beach, he seemed to simply drop his guard."

Aitkenhead reveals that almost everything about the interview was unconventional. Darling's wife, Maggie, herself a former journalist, was "extraordinarily generous and relaxed", happy to let the Guardian writer intrude on their private holiday.

"She even suggested I stay with them - if I didn't mind having to go through their bedroom to get to the loo. If they'd calculated that I'd see the Chancellor in a likeably engaging, more charismatic light on Lewis, they were absolutely right."

But, as Aitkenhead puts it, Darling is not a performer. "Having decided to be more forthcoming, I think he was unsure about how to judge where to draw the line. He basically just told the truth - and far away from Westminster, it didn't seem that shocking."