Balls lays into Brown — but why?

Normally, pre-Budget interviews with shadow chancellors are dry and methodical. But the Times’s interview with Ed Balls (£) today is the opposite: frenetic, relatively non-fiscal and utterly, utterly strange. Given that CoffeeHousers are probably waking up to brunch, I thought it might be a bit much for you to wade through his thoughts on food and on crying (‘OK. Crying. What do you want to know about crying?’). So I’ve pulled out some of the main political points from the interview here:

1) Laying into Brown. The quotation that gives the interview its headline is an eye-opener, coming as it does from Ed Balls. ‘Nobody is going to look back at any point in history,’ he says, ‘and say that Gordon Brown was a great Prime Minister.’ And although he does soften the blow immediately afterwards, by praising Brown and Alistair Darling’s response to the banking crash, it is perhals the cruellest thing that Balls has said about his old boss since this