Your five point guide to Balls’s highly political interview

It’s a strange sort of Christmas present; interviews with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls — but that’s what the papers have seen fit to deliver us this morning. There’s not much political content in the Miliband one, which is more of an At Home With Ed and Justine sort of deal. But Ed Balls’s interview with the Independent is a totally different matter. Here are five points distilled from the shadow chancellor’s words:

1) We’d cut, I tell ya. Rarely has Balls sounded as much of a deficit hawk as he does here. Sure, he drops in the usual lines about the Tories going ‘too far, too fast’, and Labour providing an ‘alternative’ — but then he blurs his dividing lines far more than usual. ‘The deficit has got to come down,’ he says, ‘There have got to be cuts.’ And, most intriguingly, he promises that, in the words of the Independent, ‘Labour will give more details of its tough spending decisions next year.’ Balls admits in this interview that voters don’t yet trust him or his party on the economy — all this is clearly part of a new, concerted drive to win them around.

2) New Year’s resolutions. And Balls’s promises for the New Year don’t end with that one about ‘tough spending decisions’. The shadow chancellor also pledges that, ‘we will be taking a tougher approach to conditionality [for benefit claimants]. If people can work, they should work. That is one example. There will be others next year of how we will show people how we will sort this out.’ Whether these ideas are bubbling up from Liam Byrne’s policy review or something outside of that, it seems that the Miliband leadership are eager to address one of their main problems: a near-complete absence of policies.  

3) The catchphrase. I expect we’ll be hearing the rather managerial phrase ‘credible optimism’ a lot in the next few months. It’s how Balls describes Labour’s agenda on a couple of occasions in this interview.

4) Balls’s hand of friendship to the some Lib Dems. It was Douglas Alexander, last week, who made a particularly breathless appeal to disaffected Lib Dems. Now Ed Balls is piping similar overtures. Here, he says, very clearly, that ‘it would be much better’ if Lib Dem MPs were to join in coalition with Labour. And he returns to the Kill Clegg strategy that Miliband first deployed during the leadership election, by saying that ‘I don’t think it’s possible for Nick Clegg to lead that move’, but that ‘I could serve in a Cabinet with Chris Huhne or Vince Cable tomorrow.’     

5) The return of Balls’s dormant leadership ambitions? A few months ago, Balls was unequivocal about the Labour leadership: he didn’t want it. But what’s this? In today’s interview, some of the old ambitions and equivocations seem to have returned:

‘As for his own leadership ambitions he is evasive, focused instead on the Treasury where he held much sway when Labour last vacated the Leader of the Opposition’s room. “I lost the leadership election; I got the office. We have got a leader. I back him 100 per cent. If the final job of my political career is Chancellor of the Exchequer, I would have had a pretty good career. My one regret would be if I don’t become Chancellor.”’