Here was a straw, a strand of weed, to stop Balls drowning

ED Balls leapt on the Coulson verdict as an acrobat grabs the buttery bar of a receding trapeze. The hot news from the Old Bailey arrived in the Commons Chamber (via MPs’ mobile telephones) halfway through Treasury Questions. Mrs Brooks, the Gloriana of Wapping, had gone free. Labour glum. But David Cameron’s former press chief Andy Coulson had been convicted. Labour gleeful.

Mr Balls and his frontbench team had been having a miserable morning. The economic revival and booming employment have made George Osborne almost i mpossible to attack. Treasury discussions at Westminster have become embarrassingly one-sided.

But here was a thread, a straw, a strand of pond weed for the drowning Ballsy. Could the hacking conviction be salvation for matelots on the glug-glugging HMS Miliband?

The Shadow Chancellor started scribbling fast on a sheet of A4. His ballpoint pen flew across the paper. Noon had come and gone and at 12.15pm the session would reach ‘topical questions’, when Mr Balls would have his second chance of the hour to quiz Mr Osborne.

The sight of him writing away, biti ng on his l ower lip, was both scintillating – here was raw political reaction, aggression, ambition, a genuinely dramatic moment – and depressing.

During the first 35 minutes of the session Mr Balls had been ostentatiously bored by the debates. Economic recovery? Yawneroo.

But suddenly there had come a verdict on a sorry episode which had nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with venomous political positioning. Mr Balls was electrified!

He was invited by Speaker Bercow to ask his topical question and he rose to the despatch box with shoulders now heavy with intent. He cried: ‘ The House and the Chancellor should know that the j ury has just delivered its verdict and the Government’s former director of communications, Mr Coulson, has been found guilty. Does the Chancellor now accept …’

Tory MPs cried ‘Order!’ and Mr Osborne looked as though a dead sardine had just been wafted under his nose.

Mr Balls: ‘… that it was a terrible error of judgment …’

The Speaker rose and said: ‘ No, this may be a matter of great interest but it doesn’t relate to Treasury Questions.’

Mr Balls: ‘ Yes it does. It does! It does!’ He was doing lots of nodding at Bercow, sitting on the edge of the bench, having been obliged to resume his seat when the Speaker intervened. Mr Squeaker entered into a passage of unusual self-doubt, of negotiation, the very model of reasonable enquiry. This is the same batey Bercow, let us remember, who is so peremptorily snippy with Tories when they even look at him in that tone of voice. Bercow whacks them with a fly swat.

YET here he was engaging with Mr Balls in a tone of Socratic debate, little pinkies aloft, nibbling the air for a taste of compromise. While Mr Balls continued to quibble, Speaker Bercow came to what we presumed would be his judgment, a greedy diner finally deciding that he really must not order the chocolate bombe surprise for pudding.

‘I really think no. I can’t see what the relevance is to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’

Still Mr Balls squittered back at Bercow. ‘It does, it does, it does.’

Any non-Labour person behaving like that would have their head bitten off. Yet this is the Speaker, of course, who was once heard to say that he was ‘a Balls man’.

And so he conceded and said to Mr Balls that he could ‘try another sentence and we’ll see’. Oh all right, just a small helping of chocolate bombe surprise.

Mr Balls cast a triumphant look at Mr Osborne and, the sides of his mouth twitching with pleasure, said the Chancellor had brought the Treasury ‘ into disrepute’ by having known Mr Coulson.

Mr Osborne: ‘ The person who worked alongside Damian McBride i s no person t o give lectures on anything.’

Deep growls of agreement from the Tories, as much directed at Mr Bercow as at Mr Balls.