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.
We ended up in lockstep on our way to the green room and he behaved towards me exactly as I would have behaved towards one of my most vituperative critics — he was charm itself. He introduced himself, offered his hand, then politely inquired whether we’d overlapped at Oxford. We quickly established that we had a friend in common. Perhaps this wouldn’t be such an uncomfortable encounter after all.
Just before we were due to go on air, he said that if Yvette had known he was due to appear with me, she never would have let him leave the house. But this was conveyed in a light, humorous tone, as if that would have been entirely unreasonable of her.
He continued in this vein in our on-air clash, beginning by saying that if he lived in Ealing he would probably send his own children to the free school I’m trying to set up. He was all sweetness and light, claiming he was in favour of parents starting schools provided they didn’t create surplus places. It completely wrong-footed me. I was expecting to be in a cage fight with a bare-knuckled thug only to find myself being love-bombed by an oleaginous maître d’. At the end of the exchange he offered to come and open the school for me. (Only afterwards did I think of the appropriate rejoinder: ‘I’ll be sure to get in touch if Geri Halliwell isn’t available.’)
On the way back to the green room I expressed surprise that he’d been so friendly.
‘I make it a rule never to make my mind up about someone before I meet them,’ he said.
‘That sounded like a dig.’
‘It was.’
He then asked why I hadn’t come to see him when he was the Secretary of State at the DCSF. ‘I would have helped you,’ he said.
I am 100 per cent sure that isn’t true. He would have told us to take a running jump, just as he did the parent group in Kirklees who sought his support. Nevertheless, his charm offensive was quite effective. As he swept out of the green room with his two outriders in tow, I felt myself warming towards him. ‘Perhaps he isn’t such a bad fellow after all,’ I thought.
Happily, the feeling soon passed. I reminded myself that he was Gordon Brown’s henchman for 13 years and had spent many a late night conspiring with Damian McBride to smear Brown’s opponents. The only reason he had been being civil on air was in the hope of coming across as Mr Reasonable in case any Labour party MPs were watching. I hope they didn’t fall for it.
Comments