Ed Balls wanted to spend his Today programme interview talking about his plans to cut the deficit by limiting child benefit increases to 1 per cent and cutting ministerial pay by five per cent. But he had two big stories to overcome that people seem more interested in. One is his accidental wounding of a journalist, which has made front page news, and the other is English votes for English laws, which is the even bigger front page news from the Labour conference so far (and with a newsless day in the hall yesterday, who can blame journalists for going after something else?).
He tried two tactics, which rather cancelled one another out. The first was to argue that there was no ‘easy solution to our constitutional situation’, which was a suitably boring, no-quotes answer.
The second was to make a series of very quotable accusations about David Cameron’s tactics in all of this, including that this was ‘possibly the most un-prime ministerial thing I’ve seen David Cameron do’, that the Prime Minister was ‘playing an English nationalist card’ because he was afraid of Ukip and that he was ‘playing fast and loose with the whole of our Union’.
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