Ten points about the Ed Balls interview

Ed Balls gets personal in his interview with the Times (£) today, but not in the way you might expect. For most of the piece he dwells on what the paper calls his “hidden vulnerability” – the effort to contain his stammer. And from there on, the politics seems a touch softer than usual. There are surprisingly few overt attacks on his opponents, and those that make the cut are considerably less violent that we’re used too.

Which isn’t to say that the interview lacks politics. No sirree. Here’s a ten-point selection of some of the political highlights (so to speak), with my added comments:   
 
1) Doubling back on a double dip. Balls says of a double dip recession: “I don’t think that’s the most likely outcome but it is certainly a possibility … The most likely thing is that the economy will grow but it will be pretty anaemic.” This is, you’ll notice, the same formulation that he used earlier this week, and is now his standard response. It’s another have-his-cake-and-eat-it moment for the shadow chancellor: if there isn’t a double dip, then he has already wound down his rhetoric; if there is a double dip, then he was the one who warned about it.

2) Down with the King. Noteworthy that some of Balls’ harshest words are reserved for the governor of the Bank of England. Speaking of Mervyn King’s general support for an “austerity package”, he says: “I don’t think his judgement is right. This is reckless.”

3) The cost of living. It’s plain to see which issue Ed Balls wants to weaponise, and it’s not the cuts. Although he doesn’t use the i-word – “inflation” – it courses through his warning that, “Lots of families won’t be able to do the kind of things that they thought they could do this year. For some it means not going on a second holiday, for some it means kids won’t get new shoes.” It’s Ed Miliband’s idea of the “squeezed middle,” only more resonant.

4) About the Darling plan. The contortions are still there when it comes to whether Balls agreed with the Darling plan, or not. He says, “I was worried about it, I thought it was too risky to pull off, but what actually happened is that we did better than expected.” But only last August, lest we forget, he was saying: “I told Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling in 2009 that – whatever the media clamour at the time – even trying to halve the deficit in four years was a mistake. The pace was too severe to be credible or sustainable.”

5) 50p is not a matter of principle. Has Alan Johnson actually had an appreciable effect on Labour’s economic policy? Looks like it. If you remember, Ed Miliband wanted the 50p rate to be permanent, but Johnson wanted it to be temporary. From that position came a compromise that I noted down at the time. Thing is, that compromise is the position that Ed Balls has now inherited. As he puts it: “What Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson said, and I have inherited, is that we would definitely have a top rate of tax for all this Parliament … I don’t think it’s sensible for people to go around saying as a matter of principle that a higher rate tax is better.”

6) Setting up straw men. “But to claim that the financial crisis was caused by too much spending is totally incorrect,” says Balls. But, hang on, no one does claim that, do they? The argument against Labour’s spending – which I most recently summarised in this post – is not that it caused the crash, but that it was so rampant before that crash that the public finances couldn’t cope with the eventual fallout. Labour were running deficits every year from 2002. That is what left us ill positioned for what was to come.

7) I don’t want to be leader. Here’s one to remember: “I’ve lived for so long in a world in which people thought about the next job. I just think for me to pull this off – and to get Ed into Downing Street – would be fabulous.” Although I suppose he could be talking in the third person.

8) Yvette’s job is easy. My favourite part of the interview has to be where he describes the job of shadow home secretary, which his wife has just taken over: “It was great to have the job of Shadow Home Secretary. I learnt how to take part on eBay, I downloaded my first album on iTunes, I read the Red Riding Quartet in a week and a half. [Shadow chancellor] is more stressful.”

9) Not red. Asked to choose between Margaret Thatcher and Karl Marx, Balls answers, “Margaret Thatcher”.

10) Not a fan of Clegg. Asked to choose between David Cameron and Nick Clegg, Balls answers, “David Cameron. At least he knows who he is.” Which won’t exactly ease this worry for Ed Miliband.