Alistair Darling’s stock-in-trade as a politician has been avoiding the limelight. He has served at a number of awkward government departments and done his best to keep them out of the headlines. He started with that instinct when appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. But as recent events have confirmed, the Treasury is too important a place to keep hidden from view and the Chancellor himself cannot afford to be anonymous. Mr Darling seems to recognise this in his interview with The Times this morning.

The run on Northern Rock was ended through his intervention on Monday night but came far too close to being a stampede that could have squashed financial institutions and squished the economy. Mr Darling made the right move in the very nick of time. But why Northern Rock’s difficulties were not spotted earlier and why the initial response of the Bank of England appears to have induced panic rather than reassurance are pressing questions. While the core of this issue remains the behaviour of banks, individually in the decisions of the Northern Rock management and collectively in terms of what has been almost a liquidity strike in the banking community, neither the current system for assuring depositors that their savings are safe nor the regulatory relationship between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority is satisfactory. Substantial reforms are required.

The Chancellor acknowledges the first of these explicitly and the second implicitly. He contends that Britain should have a US-style insurance system so that bank accounts are safeguarded up to a sizeable amount of money (£100,000). His willingness to frame legislation to this end is welcome. It will also be a delayed response to a call that Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, is known to have been making for a considerable period of time, but plainly not at the decibel level loud enough to acted upon. This is a case, though, of better late than never.

Mr Darling cannot afford to be tardy in addressing the question of “who is in charge?” The relative responsibilities of the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority have to be resolved. There is a strong argument for revisiting the ambiguous legislation that is presently in place and making the primacy of the Bank and its governor more explicit. The combination of a new guarantee system for deposits and a stronger role for the Bank should enable it to act as a lender of last resort more effectively in future.

These comparatively technical points are unlikely to trouble the bulk of the electorate. Polls would seem to suggest, perhaps temporarily and tentatively but perhaps not, that voters regard the Northern Rock saga as a crisis that came out of nowhere, was not the fault of ministers, but then seemed to be solved by ministerial activity. To that extent, far from making an early general election less plausible, as most analysts originally concluded, it might be a further factor pressing the Prime Minister towards the hustings.

There is no doubt that as the Labour Party gathers for its annual conference this weekend, the matter of election timing will dominate discussions. It is widely assumed now that Gordon Brown will take the temperature of his party, and possibly then wait to watch how the Conservatives behave in Blackpool, before closing down the election speculation one way or the other.

Most observers of Mr Brown contend that he is a cautious man who is unlikely to risk everything on an October 25 or November 1 election when there is no compelling need to gamble. Yet any ballot is a wager: the character of democracy is such that victory is never certain. If polls over the coming fortnight display a reliable lead of 5-10 percentage points for Labour, the danger may be in waiting rather than dissolving Parliament. Other evidence hints that the party is as strong as national opinion surveys indicate. In a set of local council by-elections on Thursday, Labour gained three seats, including one in Worcester (a constituency that the Tories have to win if they are to secure a majority in the Commons) with a 17.6 per cent swing in their favour.

If Mr Brown is to secure his mandate either next month, next year or later, he will have to demonstrate that under him the Government has changed some of its priorities but not its commitment to occupying the centre ground, which Tony Blair successfully annexed as his territory. This makes Mr Brown’s first conference as leader especially important. He has a trial of strength tomorrow with the trade unions over their power to push through embarrassing contemporary motions at conference, which he needs to win to demonstrate his mastery over his party. His set-piece speech on Monday has to be directed at the country at large and not simply the audience in front of him. He should aim to be a national, not a partisan, figure. For politics, like banking, ultimately comes down to confidence and trust.