I was charmed by Ed Balls on television — but thankfully the feeling soon passed

29 May 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

This promised to be an awkward encounter. I was invited on to Newsnight on Tuesday to discuss the education bill in the Queen’s Speech and my opponent was to be Ed Balls.

For me, this was a bit like an Albanian dissident being asked to participate in a studio discussion with Enver Hoxa. During the general election campaign I was an enthusiastic supporter of Antony Calvert, Balls’s Conservative opponent in Morley and Outwood, and published numerous articles taking him to task over his record as Gordon Brown’s schools secretary. Since then, I’ve become an energetic opponent of his bid to become the next leader of the Labour party.

For instance, when he disclosed that he’d offered to stand aside in favour of Yvette Cooper on the grounds that it was important that there should be a woman in the contest, I pointed out that this was an incredibly patronising thing for a husband to say to his wife. Surely, the reason Cooper should run is because she’d make a good leader of the party, not because she happens to have two X chromosomes.

As chance would have it, another anti-Balls piece of mine had appeared that morning, taking his father to task for his hypocrisy over the abolition of grammar schools. Michael Balls, a distinguished professor of biology, campaigned against the 11-plus in Norfolk only to send his son to a fee-paying school in Nottingham.

My first sight of Balls Jr was at the stage door of BBC Television Centre. He strode purposefully through the reception area with an aide in front and an aide behind like a couple of motorcycle outriders. I can report that he’s better-looking in the flesh than he is on television and bears a slight resemblance to Peter Sarsgaard, the saturnine actor who played the middle-aged sexual predator in An Education.

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