The former Labour Treasury minister who left the notorious “there’s no money” note after the party lost the 2010 general election considered “throwing himself off a cliff” in the wake of the controversy it sparked.

Liam Byrne was heavily criticised after his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, revealed the note. The outcry came at the same time that the Labour MP was trying to overcome the private grief of being unable to prevent his father dying of alcoholism.

Byrne told an audience at the Cheltenham literary festival that he was ready to leave public life in May 2010. “I hadn’t been able to save my dad from drinking and I had written this note that was now being used to hammer the Labour party,” he said.



It was in a “moment of anguish” that he sought advice from his uncle in Dorset, who walked with him to the top of the cliff behind his house at Ringstead Bay. “I was kind of ready to throw myself off,” Byrne told the audience.

He admitted he felt ashamed: “On a very personal level I thought I had failed my dad ... but in my public life I’ve also committed this terrible mistake.”

David Cameron holds up Liam Byrne’s note, which read: ‘Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam’. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Byrne wrote in the Guardian last year that “every day I have burnt with the shame” of having left the note, which “was not just stupid. It was offensive. That’s why it has made so many people so angry. And that is why it was so wrong to write”.

Former prime minister David Cameron made extensive use of the note during his campaigning for the Conservatives before the general election last year that gave his party a Commons majority.

Byrne, Labour’s MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, told the Times after his talk that he had not seriously considered suicide, but that he was at his lowest point.



Byrne said he resented the Liberal Democrat minister’s decision to make public his note, which continued a tradition begun in the 1930s by Winston Churchill.

He was at Cheltenham to talk about his book, Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain published, earlier this year.

Byrne is also chair of the all-party parliamentary group on children of alcoholics, along with the MPs Fiona Bruce, Caroline Flint and Gavin Shuker, and Baroness Hollins.

The group aims to find ways to help the UK’s 2.5 million children – one in five – who live with a parent who drinks too much.