But — for all the jollity — Darling's three years as Chancellor of the Exchequer raise important points for future public policy. Two issues are central: was the official response to the banking crisis well-designed and appropriate? Could anything have been done to prevent the severity of the downturn in late 2008 and early 2009? Darling pats himself and his colleagues on the back. In his view, they faced "enormous decisions", and "had we got them wrong, which could easily have happened, the results would have been catastrophic."

But is that the correct verdict? Let us take the official response to the banking crisis first. Basic to any assessment is the official claim — which Darling naturally accepts — that the sudden, large-scale bank recapitalisation of late 2008 was essential; and fundamental to that assessment is the extent to which the spivvy "rest", the capital providers, were protecting depositors from banks' actual and prospective losses. Complete data are now being published by central banks, including the Bank of England, for the critical period. They tell us most of what we need to know. 

Let us take the four years 2007 to 2010 inclusive as defining the Great Financial Crisis (or at any rate the Great Financial Crisis so far), the years in which — if some media reporting were to be believed — our banks concealed trillions of pounds of "toxic securities", squandered hundreds of billions of pounds and had to be "bailed out" by the taxpayer. In fact, in this four-year period the UK resident banking system as a whole had a profit of £18.6 billion and was a small net taxpayer. Admittedly, in the two worst years 2008 and 2009 by themselves, the banks had a loss of about £32 billion, and — as we know — the losses were dangerously concentrated in such organisations as RBS and HBOS. Nevertheless, over the whole crisis period Britain's banks were profitable, not loss-making, and they were not a drain on the taxpayer. 

And how much of a threat to the depositors was implied by the losses of 2008 and 2009, which admittedly were bad? According to numbers in the Bank of England's Bankstats database, the sterling liabilities (in terms of deposits and deposit-like instruments) of Britain's banks at the end of the third quarter of 2008 were just under £2,500 billion, while "other liabilities" — the liabilities to the usurious capital providers — were £388 billion. Yes, £388 billion, about a quarter of gross domestic product. So the losses in 2008 and 2009 — those two dreadful years when capitalism was supposed to be disintegrating — were actually less than 10 per cent of the capital that "the rest" had in place to protect the depositors.