Damian McBride tells The Spectator: I spoke to Ed Balls every week

When the Damian McBride scandal blew up, Ed Balls was quick to distance himself from his former colleague saying he spoke to ‘Mr McBride’ once or twice and had dealings with him when they worked in Treasury but had not had much contact since. I remember Ben Brogan (then at the Mail) blogging: ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’ (they have taken his blog down since). It summed up the reaction of most  at Westminster. The widespread assumption was that Damian McBride and Ed Balls were key members of a close-knit group of people (eight of them, I later found out) around Gordon Brown.

McBride is a guest in this week’s Spectator podcast, and I asked him about Balls. His account is difficult to reconcile with Ed Balls’s ‘Damian who?’ approach to all this”

‘So what  I mean is, I became Head of Communications at the Treasury in September 2003, he was gone by mid-2004, so we had that quite short period until he became an MP when we were working very closely together.