Ed Balls struggles to land punches in tax showdown with George Osborne

Naturally, when George Osborne and Ed Balls squared up in the Commons this afternoon for a showdown on the HSBC tax row, it wasn’t a particularly pretty affair. There was shouting, heckling, yowling – and the backbenchers were pretty aerated, too. Indeed, the Tories had turned up intending to throw the Shadow Chancellor off pace before he’d even started, shouting ‘ANSWER’ at him every time he tried to say a single word.

Balls had clearly turned up thinking that dragging the Chancellor to the Commons to answer his urgent question was victory enough. But an urgent question is only a victory if the minister responding leaves the Chamber thinking that he or she needs to get onto their officials for a more detailed briefing because the row has got bigger. Today’s Urgent Question did not do that. Osborne managed to answer the five questions that Balls had posed on HSBC rather quickly.