Ed balls

‘The Labour Party is looking to appoint a Business Relations Administrator’ according to their website. Is this the toughest job in Westminster? After a vicious onslaught from Tory sympathising CEOs like Boots’ boss Stefano Pessina and former M&S chief Stuart Rose, and more attacks expected in the run up to polling day, only those with a thick skin need apply. The lucky candidate will have to tackle allegations that Labour’s ‘business-bashing’ could harm the economy and that Ed Miliband is a ‘1970s throwback’. Another key part of the job will be ‘ensuring that the business relations database is kept up-to-date’. For all their hard work the lucky candidate will be remunerated to the tune of £26,131. Whoever gets the job can put

Patrick Wintour has a fascinating piece in The Guardian on Labour’s dilemma on tuition fees. Particularly striking is that Ed Balls is deeply concerned about how Peter Mandelson might react to any new policy. Wintour writes: ‘Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, also knows there are serious figures in the party, including the former business secretary Lord Mandelson, who will voice their concerns if a half-baked policy emerges that might damage the status of UK’s world-class universities. Mandelson made a technical criticism of the plans for a mansion tax, but supported the concept of a wealth tax. He will be less restrained if he thinks the revised tuition fees policy damages

The Commons is pretty quiet at the moment, draining of energy earlier and earlier in the week as MPs head out to their constituencies. So quiet, in fact, that Labour seems to have given up on using departmental question times as a forum for making government ministers uncomfortable or piling any political pressure on their opposite numbers. Yesterday’s Work and Pensions Questions were pretty lacklustre from an opposition attack point of view, but today’s Treasury questions were far worse. Tory MPs had turned up with piles of sickly sweet loyal questions to ask, most running along the lines of ‘is the Chancellor aware that he’s doing a fantastic job?’ The

Lord Mandelson likes to think he knows a thing or two about Labour winning elections. So it’s odd that the man so keen on message discipline should start sticking his oar into the debate about Labour’s policies with just weeks to go before the General Election. Is it that the Labour peer doesn’t think Labour will win and so was throwing caution to the wind by popping up on Newsnight to call the Mansion Tax crude and say the Lib Dems had a better-designed policy? To make matters more bizarre, he found himself being congratulated by Diane Abbott of all people, with the leftwing hopeful for Labour’s mayoral candidacy saying

Even though they ended up walking through the lobbies together (though not hand in hand, skipping, sadly), Ed Balls and George Osborne still managed to have the sort of Commons showdown that would fit right in to the script of Bridget Jones. On and on their furious fighting went, over whether the long-term economic plan was working, over whether Labour had a long-term economic plan, over whether Britain would get its AAA credit rating back, over whether Balls would borrow more and whether Osborne was cutting the deficit slower than he’d intended. On and on and on. Both looked as though they were enjoying tearing chunks out of one another

Tomorrow, in a sign of how keen the Tories are to keep the political debate focused on it, both David Cameron and George Osborne will give speeches on the economy. Cameron will announce that he is bringing forward a scheme to offer first-time buyers under 40 a 20% discount on 100,000 new home. This scheme had originally been slated for the Tory manifesto but will now be up and running before May. Inside Number 10, they hope that this scheme will help demonstrate that there are tangible benefits for voters to sticking with the Tories and their long term economic plan.   Later on, Osborne will use an address in

Labour has returned to a bit more of an even keel in the past few wintry weeks after a torrid autumn. Plotters are resigned to letting Ed Miliband fight the General Election on his terms, and given the closeness of the two parties in the opinion polls, most are concluding that a disorganised Labour party could still throw the General Election away. Of course, everyone’s still anxious, but that’s not limited to Labour. When all MPs in both parties are anxiously looking at the opinion polls every day, it’s clear that no-one’s very confident. Miliband’s team have been trying to reassure nervy MPs by pointing out, quite obviously, that this

It was a battle of the Westminster couples last night as Yvette Cooper took to the airwaves on Tom Bradby’s ITV Agenda show. Snarkily commenting from the couch at home, Sarah Vine, aka Mrs Michael Gove, publicly questioned ‘How did Ed Balls ever bag Yvette?’ The darling couple of the Brown treasury married in 1998, when Balls was working for Gordon and Yvette was a new Labour MP. But Yvette’s hubby wasn’t having any of it, hitting back ‘Errr.. Hang on.. Pots? Kettles?’ Whatever could he mean? Mr S could never imagine such rumbustious highly personal politics from Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont, Gordon Bro…oh wait. Over to you chief whip.

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

Ed Miliband is determined to talk about the NHS as much as possible at PMQs while David Cameron wants the economy to be Topic A. The result: Miliband asks about the NHS and Cameron replies by saying that you can’t have a strong NHS without a strong economy. At the moment, there is no sign of either side being able to break this PMQs stalemate. listen to ‘PMQs: Leaders battle over the NHS’ on audioBoom With the leaders stuck in a groove, the backbench questions are now where the action is. The SNP’s Pete Wishart previewed one of the SNP’s 2015 lines of attack, warning of a Ukip-UK as the

Ed Balls had two great lines of attack today at Treasury questions, but didn’t really manage to get any traction with either. He started his stint in the Chamber by trying once again to push the Chancellor on when the Treasury knew about the ‘surprise’ £1.7 billion EU bill, then moved on to the Conservatives’ failure to meet their net migration target. The first attack simply led to George Osborne saying this: ‘First of all, may I say that it is very good to see the shadow Chancellor in his place? We had heard disturbing rumours that there was going to be a shadow Cabinet reshuffle. We waited nervously by

There are many reasons why Labour conference felt flat this year, and many of them are out of the party’s control. It cannot help that its MPs and a number of its delegates are tired after an energetic Scottish campaign. It cannot help that the Scottish campaign saw a level of engagement in politics that cannot be replicated, save by another vote with a clear question and clear implications, and that would always have contrasted badly with the Labour conference. It cannot help that the referendum took place just days before the conference began, and that therefore it was impossible to get the same sort of coverage you’d expect in

One of the curious traditions of Labour conference is that directly after the Shadow Chancellor’s speech, hard copies of his wise words are sold outside the conference hall. Any fiscally responsible Labour types trying to make difficult decisions about how to spend their money might be best advised to keep their £1 in their pockets for the time being, though. Today was not Ed Balls’ finest hour. It can’t just be that many people at Labour are exhausted after the Scottish campaign to react to their Shadow Chancellor’s speech. The reaction of the conference hall was far too flat for the last conference economy speech before the general election. And