Ed Balls: dancing into the nation’s hearts?
“What the hell is going on with Ed Balls?” Back in the doldrums of the last Labour government, said Hugo Rifkind in The Spectator, Balls was “the most reliable total bastard around”. Built like his boss, Gordon Brown, “but with Hitler hair”, he was notorious as a bullying intellectual – his face “locked in a permanent sneer of disdain for people who didn’t know what post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory was”. But since losing his parliamentary seat in last year’s election, Balls has come over all lovable. He has written a memoir, Speaking Out, in which he reveals touching personal details – such as his struggle to overcome a stammer which caused him to seize up during Commons debates, and which earned him the Tory nickname Blinky Balls. And last week, the former shadow chancellor donned a spangly purple shirt and took to the dance floor in front of the nation, as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing.
In normal circumstances, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail, this transformation from political heavyweight into the comedy contestant on a dance show would not be especially troubling. “But these are not normal times.” Labour is being torn apart by the hard-left, depriving the country of a proper opposition. No current Labour MP – least of all the “slippery” Owen Smith – seems capable of stopping Jeremy Corbyn and his “crew of extremists and nutcases”. But Balls might be up to the challenge. Whatever his faults, he was always a serious and brave politician. It was Balls who saved Britain from joining the euro: only he had the “gumption” to persuade Gordon Brown to “go against the fashionable economic orthodoxy of the time”. Alas, instead of looking for a new seat to contest so that he can get back in the political game, he is “fooling around on the sidelines”. That “seems to me a tragedy”.
On the contrary, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian: it may be a stroke of genius. In modern politics, “feelings increasingly trump facts”. This is the one thing Corbyn does well: he provokes an “extraordinary emotional reaction” among his followers, partly because of his “fairy-tale” rise from the backbenches, and partly because he seems so unspun. Any Labour politician hoping to challenge him must show the public a likeable, human side – and reality TV is a great way to do that. Having already suffered the indignity of losing his seat, Balls has little to lose by doing the jitterbug in front of ten million viewers – and perhaps much to gain.