YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO WE GOT TO REVIEW ED’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY...
IS ED BALLS in danger of becoming a national treasure? For the man once called the most annoying man in British politics, it’s quite a turnaround. The building blocks are there: an appearance on Celebrity Bake Off, the chairmanship of a football club, and now, to cap it off, a star of Strictly Come Dancing. When Ed was shadowing me as Chancellor, he used to claim that anything I can do, he could do better. When it comes to the paso doble, he is almost certainly right.
To coincide with his appearance on the ballroom floor, Ed Balls has published a memoir on the man behind the tango. Speaking Out is a reference both to his robust approach to public life and to his battle to overcome a stammer – which makes for the most personal and moving part of the book.
I enjoyed reading it. It’s pretty candid, full of amusing anecdotes and makes for a breezy canter through the last 20 years of British politics. He takes the original and effective approach of telling his story by themes, so we have chapters entitled ‘Loyalty’, ‘Vulnerability’, ‘Ambition’ and ‘Emotion’, rather than sticking to a turgid timeline.
In ‘Friendship’, he reveals his poor relationship with Ed Miliband and the extraordinary fact that they only spoke to each other twice during the entire 2010 Election campaign – when David Cameron and I were speaking at least twice a day.
In a chapter oddly entitled ‘Flowers’, we hear about the perks of politics – which involved his near-death experience on Concorde. As it starts to plummet through the skies, the passengers are screaming and yet Gordon Brown, sitting next to him, wants to continue drafting a speech.
In his discussion on ‘Civility’, he tells us how he would try to wind up David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions – what he doesn’t know is that as I sat next to David, I would whisper in his ear: ‘Don’t rise to the bait.’
And in ‘Family’, Ed explains how I ended up babysitting his lovely son, so that he could go on the radio and attack me.
The question is: it may be entertaining, but what do we really learn? Over this summer, contemplating my new and unexpected life out of office, I’ve been wondering whether to write a political memoir and come to the conclusion that I’d rather not.
Ed’s book has confirmed to me that I’ve made the right decision. Autobiographies by those who’ve just left the political front line have to try hard to avoid a number of pitfalls. First, the very nature of a memoir means going back over the battles you’ve fought and refighting them. The problem is, you end up with the same result.
In my case, I don’t think there’s any point in me reliving the ins and outs of the EU referendum campaign. I made my arguments in good faith, a majority of British people didn’t accept them, and that’s that – you can’t go around like the East German government once did and say: ‘We need to elect a new people.’ In a democracy, you listen and you learn.
In Ed Balls’s case, I felt there was not enough of either. We hear again about how the financial crisis was not in any way the fault of Labour and how I was wrong to cut back on spending to reduce the record budget deficit I’d inherited.
The problem is that Ed is just as unconvincing now as he was then. The financial crisis hit Britain harder than any other major economy. The cuts in public spending didn’t choke off the recovery, as he predicted – they provided the foundations on which we helped create a record number of jobs and the fastest growth of any major advanced economy.
The public didn’t accept Ed Balls’s arguments and that’s one of the reasons why Labour lost last year’s Election. I’d like to have heard a bit more from him about what he got wrong and not what the public got wrong.
The second problem with the political memoir of someone who’s only just left the front line is that we don’t know how the story ends. I don’t know how people will write up my 11 years as Shadow Chancellor and Chancellor. I hope they will recognise the turnaround we achieved in the economy and the change we brought to make the Conservatives a modern, compassionate and credible party of government.
But that in part depends on what happens in the coming years and I intend to go on arguing that we Conservatives must remain firmly rooted on the centre ground of British politics, with a credible economic policy and in touch with modern Britain.
Ed Balls clearly has some major and lasting achievements to his credit. He helped to keep us out of the euro. He was a driving force in making the Bank of England independent. It’s hard to imagine anyone trying to reverse that sensible decision now, although Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell does flirt with the idea.
That speaks to a wider issue which Ed Balls doesn’t really face up to. For someone who for 20 years was a key architect of both the New Labour Government and the last Labour Opposition, it’s not enough to wipe your hands of what’s happened to Labour since.
He is scathing about Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of winning an Election, dismissing what he’s offering as a ‘hard-Left utopian fantasy’. Yet we hear too little about why the Labour Party he helped lead for so many years has turned its back on reality.
Nor do we hear about how he and Ed Miliband oversaw a disastrous change in the rules that has allowed their party to be captured by anarchists and Marxists, without any obvious way of wrestling back control. It must go down as one of the most catastrophic mistakes in recent British political history and it could spell the death of the Labour Party. We don’t know yet.
We do know it has created the weakest Opposition our country has ever seen. I know. I’ve been part of some pretty weak ones in the past, but nothing like this lot.
That feels like unalloyed good news for the Conservatives in the short term – but I am not sure it is over a longer period. Ed Balls was an effective opponent who kept me on my toes. I knew mistakes or weaknesses in my arguments would be brutally exposed by him.
We were never friends, but we respected each other. That’s not the case with what passes for the Labour front bench today – and that’s not ultimately a good thing for us Conservatives. I find it hard to say it, but we miss Ed Balls.
In a parliamentary democracy, as on Strictly Come Dancing, it takes two to tango.
The problem is, he’s just as unconvincing now as then