The focus of this chapter is the period of April 2008 to March 2009, when the ‘credit crunch’ turned into what has been widely described as the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. Since the United Kingdom experienced the first effects of the global financial crisis in September 2007, this chapter summarises the early rhetoric of each actor. Exploring their early crisis framing establishes how much room each actor left himself to manoeuvre when the crisis worsened through 2008. The speeches analysed within this chapter were sourced from the official web sites of the individual or their institution. The speeches were identified as being significant because of their heavy use of crisis-exploitation rhetoric, but also because most of them received considerable media coverage. It is worth noting that Darling’s and King’s web sites did not provide a wide range of their speeches and were missing some speeches that had been mentioned in the media. This meant that not only was the choice of speeches somewhat limited, the Chancellor and the bank governor had, by omitting some speeches from their web sites, signalled that others were the ones intended for public consumption.

The chapter attempts to gauge the media and public response to the crisis exploitation of the three actors through a survey of three newspapers that represent a fair spectrum of British society: The Guardian/Observer, The Times and the Financial Times. The Guardian (circulated Monday to Saturday) and its sister paper, The Observer (circulated on Sundays), owned by the public non-profit Scott Trust, currently have circulations of about 400,000 (Guardian 2009). They are typically seen as left leaning. Whereas 80 per cent of The Guardian/Observer readership voted Labour in 2000, a 2005 survey showed that only 48 per cent voted Labour. This figure was likely to be even lower by 2008 given the further slide in Labour’s popularity (Ipsos Mori Poll 2005).

The Times, owned by News Corporation and historically the best-known UK paper, has a circulation of 617,000. Its Sunday edition momentarily has a circulation of 1.2 million (Guardian 2009). For decades, it took a centre-right political stance, but in the 2001 and 2005 elections, it supported the Labour Party. The Daily Telegraph, a paper with a political stance further right than The Times and a slightly larger overall readership, was not selected for analysis because of its limited coverage of the global financial crisis. The Financial Times has a lower circulation than the aforementioned papers, but offers a deeper level of economic insight to the crisis. It is owned by the education and media conglomerate Pearson PLC and generally adopts free-market stances (Financial Times 2009b). All three selected papers are published in London. When attempting to track the media and public response to the three key actors’ crisis rhetoric, however, the cross-section of ideological views was deemed to be more important than a regional interpretation of the crisis.