Dear God, am I going to start liking Ed Balls?

What the hell is going on with Ed Balls? Back in the horrible doldrums of the last Labour government, he was the most reliable total bastard around. There was Gordon Brown himself, of course, throwing phones at people and using his special sinister voice when he spoke about children, and Damian McBride, who had a reputation for being the nastiest spin-doctor there ever was, although he only ever texted me twice and actually quite nicely. Balls, though, was the spirit animal who tied the whole thing together.

So many years later, it is almost impossible to convey how weary and stale that government was by the end. How it seemed to only have two modes, which were moments of belligerent chaos and the lulls between them, during which it sat there, covered in the crumbs of its own garage snacks, breathing too fast. If David Cameron seemed fresh, likeable and normal back then, and he did, then Balls was at least part of the reason why. Built like his boss, but with Hitler hair, his face seemed to be locked in a permanent sneer of furious disdain for people who didn’t know what post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory was. And the fact that his wife was Yvette Cooper somehow seemed to remove all possibility of a hinterland; even the Milibands weren’t actually married to each other. However little you knew about him, you knew he was no fun at all.

Well, not any more. This weekend — and brace yourself here for a phrase I might have written as frankly lacklustre satire in 2009 — Ed Balls is to be a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. He shall wear sequins, presumably, and run his hand up and down the face of some colt-like dancing professional in a manner that is a bit sexy but not too sexy for family television.