Ed balls

Monday

James Forsyth

The government contradicts itself on Megrahi

David Miliband on the Today Programme on September 2nd: “We did not want him [Megrahi] to die in prison.” Ed Balls on the Today Programme on September 7th: “None of us wanted to see the release of al-Megrahi” Considering that Megrahi was sentenced to life imprison for his role in the Lockerbie bombing, I cannot see how both of these statements of the government’s view can be correct. If the government did not want him to die in prison, it wanted him to be released.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Exam result shock: Balls fails

You know how it is.  You start reading an article by Ed Balls – in this case, in today’s Guardian – and, before long, you’ve come across so many deceptions, half-truths and tribal slurs that you decide to fisk the whole thing.  So here is Balls’s article, with my supplementary comments in bold: The first group of young people to have been entirely educated under Labour pick up their GCSE results today. No doubt this will provoke some commentators into even greater efforts to do down their achievements – claiming more young people succeeding must mean exams are getting easier. In the early years of David Cameron’s leadership, the Tories

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Gove stirs up trouble for Balls

I gave it a passing mention in my last post, but it’s worth highlighting Michael Gove’s mischievous comment piece in the the Guardian today.  Why “mischievous”?  Well, because its purpose seems to be to rile Ed Balls and mobilise his internal opponents: ‘In a series of not so subtle signals to the grassroots, Ed has been emphasising, whenever the opportunity arises, that he is the socialist candidate for anyone in the party who wants to move away from the sullied compromises of Blair era. In a recent interview he explained that the battle for the leadership would be a struggle between David Miliband and himself – setting up the contest

Wednesday

James Forsyth

How close we came to Chancellor Balls

Sue Cameron’s Notebook in the FT is one of the best guides there is to the mood in Whitehall. The main focus of her column today is the discontent among the Mandarins about the fact that huge cuts will have to be made but they are getting no guidance from their current ministers as to where and how this is to be done. But the bit which stood out to me was how advanced Ed Balls plans for moving to the Treasury were. Cameron reports that: “Some in Whitehall have still not recovered from the reshuffle drama when schools secretary Ed Balls had his hopes of becoming chancellor dashed. ‘It

Monday

Martin Bright

Ed Balls and Tribune

Ed Balls has just started on Twitter and he’s already an avid user. I have always found Ed perfectly charming, but then, unlike Fraser, he has never bawled me out about anything I have written (even when I suggested he was a socialist). But when I saw the following “tweet” I thought he was demonstrating his legendary capacity for threatening behaviour: “despite glossy makeover, it’s still the same old Tribune — just like the Tories.” Being able to sound menacing in a “tweet” is some skill. What was he getting at? Could he really be saying that Tribune was as bad as the Tories? Had the paper’s mild-mannered editor, Chris McLaughlin

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Pure Balls | 5 July 2009

According to the Sunday Times, poor old Shaun Woodward is getting the blame for inspiring Brown’s mendacious “Labour investment v Tory cuts” line. As if. This is the work of Ed Balls, and his trademark belief that the public can be easily fooled on such issues because their eyes glaze over when you mention statistics. A quick chronology: when the 10 percent figure came out in my Daily Telegraph piece it was Ed Balls who seized on it (his wife did so earlier that day with the Standard) and used it in a letter to Michael Gove demanding where those 10 percent cuts would be made. He used my figure as

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Fear and Loathing at the Heart of Government

There’s some really fascinating stuff knocking around today. Rachel Sylvester’s column in The Times is really quite extraordinary. She claims that in a conference call with Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls, the Prime Minister could not be persuaded to concentrate on domestic policy and kept returning to the international global crisis. Were there others involved in the call or is one of Balls or Mandelson briefing the Blairite Sylvester (hmm, I wonder)? Pete Hoskin over at Coffee House has suggested that the level of humility in Alistair Darling’s interview in today’s Telegraph and similar noises from Ed Balls suggest that perhaps Brown will go for a mea culpa of his

Sunday

Martin Bright

Here’s the Latest From Your Neo-Con Socialist

I was always shocked by the level of vitriol among New Statesman and Guardian readers when a writer stepped away from the comfort zone of received wisdom and cuddly “I’m a nice person too” leftie-ness. Suggest that perhaps Hamas is anything other than a resistance movement or that people who vote Conservative might be people too and the sky falls in. Where the stock term of self-righteous abuse used to be “fascist” – remember Rick from the Young Ones? – it is now “neo-con”, which consigns the target  to the same ideological hell as George W. Bush. Since I’ve started this new blog I have not been called a neo-con. Instead, the insult

Friday

Martin Bright

The Adrian Mole Generation Should Step up to the Plate

It’s perhaps a step too far to mix a reference from a popular work of 1980s satirical fiction with a phrase borrowed from baseball in the headline of this piece, but somehow it seemed to capture the situation. With increased speculation about Harriet Harman’s leadership ambitions the time has come for the younger generation of Labour politicians (most of whom are a simillar age to Sue Townsend’s hero) to start sticking their heads aboove the parapet. A name that seems to be emerging as a possible runner is Treasury minister Yvette Cooper. I have often wondered whether we would ever see a husband and wife team in No. 10 and No.