Ed Balls survives tricky Autumn Statement response under intense heckling

Labour has had a poor run of Autumn Statement and Budget responses for a couple of years now, and with only today’s statement and the 2015 Budget to go before the General Election, the stakes were pretty high for Ed Balls. The Tories had clearly turned up expecting him to do a terrible job, and their heckling club (which you can read more about here) was out in force.

The Shadow Chancellor stood up to a wall of noise. Tory backbenchers had arranged a number of words to shout at him before entering the Chamber. I understand that one of them was ‘apologise’, which they’ve used before on Balls. It was so bad that Speaker Bercow had to tell them off before the frontbencher had even started speaking. Then he spent the first chunk of his speech trying to say what he’d planned to say, turning to individual Tory backbenchers and telling them that they should listen to what he had to say, and letting Bercow step in again and again to scold badly-behaved MPs.