Musicals are brilliant – and the perfect escape from politics
After a bruising political career, Ed Balls found salvation in Strictly. He talks to Chris Harvey about his new life in light entertainment
I’m not intending to say anything much about politics,” says Ed Balls, when we meet outside the Garrick Theatre in the West End. The former shadow chancellor-turned-gangnam Style dancer on Strictly is planning instead to talk about musicals for the Radio 2 show he’s doing on New Year’s Day. As we turn towards the stage door, he is approached by a man asking for change, to whom he readily provides a coin. “Thank you, sir,” the man responds. “You’re a great actor.”
Balls doesn’t try to correct him and is soon adding to the confusion by showing off his piano skills for the photoshoot. He’s thickset with that bruiser’s profile that fits his early reputation as an intimidating presence at the Treasury under Gordon Brown, but his gaze is almost innocently enthusiastic. He seems to be loving his surprising new life, which began when he lost his seat in the 2015 election. “I went from being a politician to being on reality TV and embarrassing my kids,” he says.
Balls has been a fan of musical theatre from childhood, a passion that came from his parents, who lived in the US for a time before he was born. “The earliest songs I can remember are Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord from Godspell and Puff the Magic Dragon.” His parents met when they were in a church choir as teenagers in Norwich, and were active Christians at university. “Every Sunday we’d go to church… we went to the kind of churches where even in the Seventies, you had the odd bass guitar.” For Balls, though, it was musicals that hit the spot. “I’ve loved them all my life,” he says, and as a nine-year-old his ambition – if he couldn’t be a centre forward for his beloved Norwich City – was to be in the chorus of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
“When it was touring they would choose a school choir, and in the village where we lived there was another primary school, which got to be the chorus for the Nottingham performance.” (His father is a professor at Nottingham University). “I went to see it and I was so jealous.”
It sounds as if a natural exhibitionist tendency was always lurking under the surface – although hurdles had to be overcome before he could jive so unselfconsciously in 2016. This is the man, after all, who was once mocked as “blinky Balls” for his TV performances, and who sought help to overcome an internalised stammer. Musicals are, he says, an escape from politics, even when they’re covering political topics – he raves about the 9/11 musical Come From Away, which he saw on Broadway in the summer, as “one of the best things I’ve seen”.
Other favourites include West Side Story and Evita. He also admits to having seen Wicked seven times with his family – he’s married to the Labour MP Yvette Cooper (who ran against Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015 and came third). They have three children – Ellie, 18, Joe, 16, and Maddy, 13. He was offered tickets to the hip-hop musical Hamilton, but turned them down so they could go as a family. Hamilton is the story of the American founding father Alexander Hamilton, who died in a pistol duel with Aaron Burr, the US vice-president, in 1795.
Balls, of course, had some dust-ups with David Cameron across the despatch box, and wrote in his autobiography about heckling the former PM to try to make him reveal his “inner Flashman”. Cameron blasted him as a “muttering idiot” when Balls told him to “chillax and have another glass of wine”, after reading that the Tory leader liked to relax on a Sunday with three or four glasses. Does Balls think political life would be simpler if the duel was reintroduced as a form of conflict resolution? “I think it could be destabilising,” he deadpans. “That is the nature of the House of Commons, you are placed slightly further apart than [the length of ] two swords. I’m not sure it was always very edifying. I would often walk out after Prime Minister’s Questions and think, what am I doing with my life?”
We talk about whether there is danger in the conflation of politics with celebrity where we have seen, alongside his Strictly appearance, George Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother while a serving MP and former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale ploughing through fish guts on I’m a Celebrity. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has gone the other way, from The Apprentice to US president, although Balls doesn’t think this would happen here, and points out there is no evidence in British politics of anyone being able to make the journey from celebrity to politician and succeeding to high office.
His own decision to appear on Strictly was, he claims, not for political gain – “people are very acute, they would see it pretty quickly” – but because it was the programme around which Saturday night family viewing had revolved for years, and because Cooper talked him round from his original “emphatic no”. He believes Cooper would have had a better chance than himself in the 2015 leadership election. But he has come to realise, post-strictly, that politicians who reveal a human side stand more chance of not being seen as “out for themselves, not one of us” in this age of political distrust. “One of the nice but annoying things that people say to me is that on Strictly we found out you are a human being, but of course I always was.” Was it all part of a cunning plan to one day become prime minister? “I think it would be a really, really bad mindset for me if I spent the next 10 years doing everything I do in the hope that somehow it might mean that I go back and do what I did before,” he says.
That is not to say he would never do it again, he stresses. “Actually, if I spend the next 20 years of my life not doing anything that you might call public service or something hard – being in Cabinet is so hard, it’s so exposed and the things you do are so difficult – if I never get that chance again, I’ll be disappointed.”
He has, however, discussed with Michael Portillo how he found his own return to politics two and a half years after he lost his seat in the 1997 election, and says that Portillo told him it was the worst thing he ever did. Balls says he will see what happens.
Losing his seat came as a shock at first but he says he had always been haunted by the fear of another five years in opposition. He also doesn’t think he could have served in Corbyn’s Cabinet because of fundamental disagreements on policy. These days, he says, “unless you say that the New Labour government was a centrist, establishment, mainstream sell-out, you’re not properly Labour, you’re a ‘red Tory’. That upsets me.”
Will his new career make people forget he’s clever? He’s at pains to point out that he is presenting a “serious” TV series for the BBC in the new year about Trump’s America, although he admits that appearing on Strictly had been a worry. “The thing I felt was if I did the cha-cha-cha did that mean that I could never talk about Brexit again? But to my surprise I think people found that quite easy to deal with.” In fact, for the past nine months, he’s been involved in a research project at Harvard about the effects of leaving the EU. Is Theresa May the right person to lead the country at this historic moment? “No”, he says flatly, suggesting the secret of her success at the Home Office was keeping her head down. “I can’t see that she herself can conclude the negotiation in the next 24 months, it’s too hard, I just don’t think she can.”
One can sense Balls is anxious to have some influence. For now though, freed from the “exposure” of political life, he seems to be a changed man, and he doesn’t mind if people think he’s wasting his talents. “If I was just Basil Brush, I would probably think I should do more with my life. [There again] if you can make people smile, that’s quite nice.”
Ed Balls on Musical Theatre is on Radio 2
on New Year’s Day at 3pm