‘Muttering idiot’ Ed Balls: PM and I have never exchanged a single word outside Commons
DAVID CAMERON is not the first party leader to find Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls annoying. As a loyal ally of Gordon Brown, he treated Blair with contempt to his face. Now he’s trying to get under Cameron’s skin. And judging from the Prime Minister’s actions in the Commons last week, he is succeeding.
Their clash came when Cameron hailed the Government’s ‘hard-won credibility on the economy — which we wouldn’t have if we listened to the muttering idiot opposite me’.
Balls claims Cameron lost his rag because he has ‘found him out’ on the economy. ‘Cameron can dish it out, but he can’t take it,’ he says in an interview with The Mail on Sunday.
‘He was his usual boastful self, but when I said to him “You aren’t mentioning the recession,” it got to him. When he looks at me, he thinks: “This guy has found me out.”’
The jibe was the culmination of a sustained barrage from Mr Balls.
He also shouted ‘have another glass of wine’ — a reference to reports about the PM’s ‘chillaxing’ at Chequers; he made a ‘flatlining’ hand gesture – meant to signify the economy — and cried ‘Flashman’ (referring to the bully in Tom Brown’s School Days). Eventually, Cameron snapped. MPs often hurl insults at each across the despatch box only to retreat away from the public gaze and chat amicably.
Not so with Balls and Cameron. So deep is their mutual loathing they have never exchanged a single word outside the Commons debating chamber.
Balls says: ‘George Osborne and I often talk to each other. We’ve always had a good relationship. He can separate personal from politics.
‘Cameron can’t take a joke and doesn’t talk to Labour MPs. He expects deference.’
What happens when they pass in a Commons corridor? ‘He passes by at speed.’ The chasm between them is all the more odd bearing in mind the parallels in their backgrounds. Both are 45 and went to private school — though Mr Balls’s fee-paying Nottingham High School was not in the same category as Mr Cameron’s Eton.
They were also contemporaries at Oxford; both cut their teeth as Treasury backroom boys and both attached themselves to driven leaders: Balls to Brown and Cameron to Michael Howard.
For much of their recent sparring, Mr Cameron has thrown the first blow.
He told Mr Balls to ‘shut up and listen’; called him ‘the most annoying man in politics’ and had to apologise after saying he had Tourette’s.
Initially, Cameron had the upper hand. But less so now.
Tory MP Nadine Dorries’s ‘arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk’ jibe at Cameron and Osborne has stuck.
With a growing feeling that people such as Cameron are not hit by ‘austerity Britain’, he is now vulnerable to Balls’s ‘Flashman’ label.
I wonder aloud whether Mr Balls’s determination to avenge the PM’s jibes stems from being bullied as a child for his stammer. It was his wife Yvette Cooper, Labour’s home affairs spokeswoman, who persuaded him to talk publicly about it. ‘My stammer has always been in the background,’ he says.
He insists instead his heckles are intended as a ‘mirror’ to show to Mr Cameron what is happening in the real world.
‘He says: “The economy is doing well.” I say: “We are in a recession.” He says: “My plans are on track.” I say: “We are flatlining.” I am saying: “You can’t say black is white and get away with it.” He isn’t comfortable with the reflection he sees.’
BALLS’S confidence has been buoyed by his success in predicting the double dip recession. It was a huge gamble, but it has paid off. He knows what it is like to have an image problem. According to Labour sources he has commissioned research to find out why he is not more popular with voters.
But surely there is more than a grain of truth in Mr Cameron’s ‘most annoying man in politics’ remark? He laughs it off: ‘I thought it was a tribute. A poll found that Osborne is as annoying as me, Cameron is more annoying and Peter Mandelson is the most annoying.’ He mocked Cameron’s ‘chillaxing’, but how does he relax with wife Yvette and their three young children? ‘I like to cook,’ he says.
‘Last weekend I did pork loin in milk. You cook it for a couple of hours after filling the dish with milk and adding garlic, thyme, onion and lemon. The milk curdles and you get this rich, tender, milky, herby dish.’ Does he ever let Yvette cook? ‘Rarely. She has other things to do.’ Who wears the trousers? ‘I wear them probably more than her, but she doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone.’ Who disciplines the children? ‘I cook and pick up wet towels. Yvette does the child care. If one of the kids has to go to the doctor, she will take them.
‘If we go to the garden centre to buy pots and plants we do it together because neither trusts the other to get it right. It’s the same with holidays.’
He is too smart to fail the ‘price of a pint of milk’ test, replying: ‘About 45p.’ He says he does all the shopping, alternating between Tesco and posh Ocado.
Friends say he still smarts at his defeat in the Labour leadership contest in 2010 by Ed Miliband. When they both worked for Brown, Balls treated Miliband as a tea boy.
His Labour foes say he is too abrasive to win over voters — and say his wife is a better bet. Have they both given up their leadership ambitions?
‘We both support Ed so it doesn’t arise. The thing about me and Yvette and Ed is that we are veterans in our mid 40s.
‘We have been through the whole Blair-Brown era.’
He insists he would step aside in favour of his wife in any leadership contest and is adamant he ‘just wants to be Chancellor’. But he avoids ruling out another stab at the top job.
He also denies treating Ed Miliband with disdain: ‘We are closer than ever. I can say to Ed “I got something wrong” and he can do the same to me.’
He praises Ed Miliband’s resilience, though adds: ‘You have to be careful because a zen-like calm can become horizontal, but he doesn’t get thrown off course by the day to day and that is important.’
No sign of deference there, then.