Ed balls

Westminster Christmas party season is in full swing. Half the Cabinet dropped by the Sky News bash at the Intercontinental last night. Mick Hucknall was also there, which was odd. The big news of the evening came when the head of Sky News, Jon Riley, confirmed that all three party leaders have now officially agreed to TV debates at the next election. Details were sparse because there appears to be deadlock over formats, timings and even the number of debates. The debates are on, though. Officially. In some form. It was a busy old evening for political-ornithologists. Tim Yeo lurked in the corner, looking glum. Chris Bryant refused to ‘twerk’ with

Loan sharks got a biff on the nose at PMQs today. Cameron wants to cap the sum that each of us can borrow. Ed Miliband was puzzled. This is a U-turn, he said. When he proposed to cap energy bills Cameron called it ‘Marxism.’ Cameron shrugged this off. And he gloatingly invited Miliband to ‘congratulate us’ for pushing through an important reform. Tricky for Ed. When the government filches your idea, you can’t complain without seeming to oppose your own position. Miliband moved to the looming winter crisis which he seems to be looking forward to. Last year an additional 31,000 deaths were recorded. All the PM’s fault, apparently. ‘Any

Six and a half years after Gordon Brown finally badgered Tony Blair out of Downing Street, the relationship between these two men still dominates British politics. Why? Because David Cameron and George Osborne, and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are, in their different ways, doing what they can to prevent history repeating itself. Their relationships are both informed by the Blair-Brown breakdown. Cameron and Osborne have quite deliberately structured their working lives to avoid replicating the tensions within New Labour. The pair shared a set of offices in opposition with their aides sitting in the same room. This was meant to prevent the emergence of two separate, competing power centres.

The national debt figures are out – £1.2 trillion and rising – and although I hate to say it, the Labour Party has a valid point to make. If you don’t adjust for inflation, Osborne has borrowed more in under four years than the Labour Party borrowed over 13 years. It’s unusual for Ed Balls to talk about debt accumulation as a bad thing, perhaps because his policy remains the accumulation of even more debt. But here’s the story so far:- Labour is, as ever, spinning too much. As they know, you need to adjust for inflation to make any meaningful comparison in public spending. But the overall point holds.

It started as soon as Ed Miliband stood up at PMQs today. ‘Nightmare!’ yelled the Tories. ‘Nightmare!’ They’d been fired up by the first question from Steve Brine, who craftily double-loaded his query. He referenced the Co-op bank and the ‘nightmare email’ in one sentence. Would the PM respond, he asked, ‘to grave concerns about the nightmare unfolding at the Co-operative?’ Cameron pretended to be all serious. He fretted about the regulatory controls and about safeguarding the bank without fleecing the tax-payer. ‘Nightmare!’ goaded the Tories. Ed Balls, seated beside Miliband, flushed puce. Not a natural Trappist, the shadow chancellor is clearly under orders to shut his gob during PMQs.

Congratulations to Labour’s Gavin Shuker for some spectacular brown nosing. The Luton MP has thrilled readers of his blog with an account of him playing the ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ boardgame. It’s a riveting read: ‘I worked my way through all fifteen questions effortlessly, and nailed that £1 million – much to the annoyance of everyone else playing. But then again, they should have seen it coming. It really helps when your phone a friend can feature Ed Balls on economics, Douglas Alexander on geography, and Andy Burnham on the NHS.’ He concludes that he’s ‘one of life’s winners’. Pass the sick bucket.

It has long been suspected that there are tensions between Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The pair fell out badly over the third runway at Heathrow in government and when Miliband was elected leader, he conspicuously didn’t offer Balls the job of shadow Chancellor. But since Balls became shadow Chancellor the pair has largely succeeded in keeping their differences under wraps. But the leaked emails revealed by Simon Walters in the Mail on Sunday today, show what Miliband’s team privately thinks of Balls. Torsten Bell, one of Miliband’s most influential aides, calls Balls a ‘nightmare’ and complains about how complicated his message on the economy is. Tellingly, he isn’t rebuked

Gordon Brown used to joke that there are only two types of Chancellors: ‘those who fail and those who get out in time.’ Inside this joke lay his strategy: he was stoking a debt-fuelled bubble that was going to burst, but he hoped it would do so after the election or on someone else’s watch. It’s the textbook definition of putting party over country. I’m afraid that we can see its reflection in Help to Buy. David Cameron’s article in the Sun today shows this politicking is back. Look, he said, this policy shows I’m on the side of aspirational voters. If you want to get on in life, the

The never-ending slew of messages from Labour figures about the party’s ‘clear’ position on high-speed rail was part of an attempt by the party to show that it is a credible opposition that scrutinises policies rather than blindly supports them. But this got rather confusing last week as each ‘clear position’ was a little different to the last. So today Ed Balls tried to set out Labour’s clear position more clearly when he spoke to the CBI conference. And it turns out that this position is the same as it was at the party’s conference. Here is the section on the new line in the Shadow Chancellor’s speech: ‘Labour supports

A year ago the electoral strategies of the two main parties seemed set. The Conservatives would stand as the party of prudence, claiming to have saved Britain from a Greek-style meltdown through austerity measures which, though painful at the time, had eventually borne fruit in the shape of a private sector-led recovery. Labour, meanwhile, would stand as the party for public investment, promising to repair what it saw as the damage wrought by cuts. Since then, things have got better for the Tories than they could have imagined. Not only did a threatened triple-dip recession fail to materialise, but revisions to economic data concluded that Britain did not even suffer a

Talking about energy bills week in, week out might be good politics for both parties, but it sure does make for a grumpy PMQs session. David Cameron was still rather ratty this week, but he managed some better attacks on Miliband than he’s done in the past few weeks of the great energy debate. He tried to pin the blame for the current state of the energy market on Miliband, saying: ‘Who gave us the Big Six? Yes, when Labour first looked at this, there were almost 20, but because of his stewardship we’ve ended up with six players.’ He also accused the party of pushing for yet more price

The government’s approach to the HS2 debate has changed. Up until recently, government sources would wave away the suggestion that Labour might withdraw its support for the project. They’d point to Andrew Adonis and his influence on Ed Miliband to explain why Ed Balls’s doubts about it didn’t matter that much. But this has now changed. They’ve now decided, in the words of one Number 10 figure, that they need to ‘smoke Labour out on the issue’. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see the Tories trying to put more and more pressure on Labour to say whether or not they’ll back it. Number 10 is acutely aware that, at

Newcastle upon Tyne Andrew Adonis is not your conventional ‘retired’ politician. The sprightly 50-year-old shadow infrastructure minister remains more influential than his current job title suggests. After running Tony Blair’s policy unit at No. 10, Adonis kick-started the academies programme and paved the way for Michael Gove’s education revolution. Under Gordon Brown he rose to Secretary of State for Transport, where he renationalised the East Coast railway and conceived High Speed 2. Adonis took a central role in Labour’s failed coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems (a party he was once a candidate for) before quitting frontline politics. Today, Adonis is more instrumental to Labour than ever, leading Ed Miliband’s

Here’s a favourite Tory joke. Question: What does ‘BBC’ stand for? Answer: Buggers Broadcasting Communism. David Cameron seemed tempted to try this gag at PMQs today. He mentioned the Beeb four times in sardonic asides. ‘Let’s praise the BBC for once,’ he said, bitingly. He woke this morning, he said, to a BBC report stating that public satisfaction with council services had risen despite the cuts. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ He berated Ed Miliband for wanting to introduce new decarbonisation targets. ‘Even the BBC doesn’t agree with that.’ And he attacked Milband’s promise to freeze energy bills as evidence that ‘he’d like to live in a

Poor old Ed Balls. He’s been making predictions of doom that now appear to have gone too far and too fast. The latest blow to the Shadow Chancellor is that the IMF, which he went through a period of definitely liking a lot when its lieutenants started suggesting that austerity was ‘playing with fire’, has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK by more than any other major economy. This map from the organisation’s latest World Economic Outlook illustrates rather neatly how well the IMF expects the UK to do in comparison to other European economies. Obviously this doesn’t mean that everything is fine and dandy and that everyone in the UK can