No time for pleasantries. Get ready for Osborne v. Balls

The night Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour party, his advisers sent him to bed before midnight and confiscated his mobile phone.

The night Ed Miliband was elected leader of the Labour party, his advisers sent him to bed before midnight and confiscated his mobile phone. Half a mile away from where the new leader was sleeping, Ed Balls was holding a wake with his closely knit, leadership campaign team. Here, no one was going to tell him what to do. He was going to sing, sup and speechify for as long as he wanted.

In the wee small hours of the morning, Balls kept rallying his troops. His wife Yvette Cooper, her voice shot from the evening’s karaoke, had retreated to the couple’s room at the conference hotel hours earlier. But Balls just carried on. He stood there in his shirt sleeves, a dominating physical presence. He held the room with ease. Emotional tributes to his campaign team were interspersed with extracts from his Bloomberg speech on the economy and passionate paeans to socialism.

The whole performance would have been risible had it not been for the rapt attention with which his team listened. This group, forged in the heat of the leadership campaign, wanted to follow Balls wherever he went. When I saw him that night, keeping the party going, I assumed that he had nothing in his diary the next day. But in the morning he was playing football by 9 a.m. At noon, he gave a big TV interview in which he made a typically aggressive intervention in the debate about what Labour’s economic policy should be. Throughout, he showed no ill effects from the night before. Indeed, his TV performance set the economic agenda for the conference.

This full-blooded approach to life and politics explains why Westminster has reacted to Balls’s appointment as shadow chancellor as the residents of Hadleyville did to Frank Miller’s return.