Mrs and Mr Balls

I have always maintained that if there was a future Prime Minister in the Balls household, it was Yvette rather than Ed - most recently in this post published on Monday.

Today, with Ed Balls in hot water after apparently saying "So what?" to a claim that UK taxes are now the highest in history, I wonder whether the wider political commentariat might now start to realise this.

While Ed was making a fool of himself in the Chamber, and providing an open goal for David Cameron as he sought to dismantle the Budget, Yvette was doing the rounds of College Green and the TV studios presenting the Government's case in her usual cool, calm, quietly persuasive manner.

Mike Smithson goes so far as to speculate today that Balls' antics might have cost Labour the next election. I would certainly agree that the more the public sees of Balls, the less they will be inclined to vote for the party.

Balls was already deeply implicated in last autumn's election debacle, shooting his mouth off on the radio about whether "the gamble" lay in holding the election or delaying - with the clear implication that the riskier course was delay.

I believe that was the moment when the public began to turn against Brown, the moment it became clear that the decision over whether to hold the election was being very clearly determined not by the national interest but by narrow party advantage.

Gordon should have learned his lesson from that and put Balls firmly back in his box before now, but old loyalties notwithstanding, perhaps it's time he echoed the words of Clem Attlee to Harold Laski - and I use the full quote here advisedly.

"I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

Boring...but not bad

I had thought of doing a blog-boycott of this year's Budget, so narcoleptic was the content, but on reflection...there are some positives to be taken from Mr Darling's package from a progressive/green point of view.

As the driver of a Vauxhall Zafira who likes the odd drop of Scotch, I am probably going to be among the people worst hit by today's announcements, but I'm entirely content that it should be so.

The 55p a bottle increase in whisky duty will in fact cost me the princely sum of around £3.20 a year, which seems a small price to pay to help curb the binge-drinking culture and do my bit towards lifting 250,000 children out of poverty.

And although I only drive a people carrier out of necessity in order for me to be able to take my growing family away for weekends along with all their assorted clobber, I think it's only right that people like me should pay more to alleviate the effects of our environmental pollution.

That said, it was undoubtedly the most politically unexciting Budget since 1997, and some papers may well not even lead on it tomorrow. Maybe that's the government's intention though.

I liked James Forsyth's take on it at Spectator Coffee House. "I suspect that the government will be quite pleased if this Budget is nothing more than a one day story.....Darling must be hoping that by hopping on the Mail’s ban the bag bandwagon, he has guaranteed himself favourable coverage in at least one paper."

I have some sympathy for Mr Darling in that Gordon Brown really "stole" this Budget last year, by pre-announcing the 2p cut in income tax.

That said, had Brown not announced this a year ago, it is a fairly moot point whether it would have happened at all, as it's hardly now the time for big tax reductions amid all the "global financial turbulence."

Short memories

According to a poll carried out on Iain Dales' Diary, Gordon Brown is the worst Labour Chancellor ever, with 44pc of the vote compared to just 13pc for Jim Callaghan, who devalued the pound in 1967. Even allowing for the fact that many readers of Iain's blog wouldn't have been born then, some historical perspective is called for, methinks.

Norman Lamont, meanwhile, rates as the worst Tory holder of the post, with 38pc compared to 23pc for Anthony Barber. It is unclear how many people voted for David Derrick Heathcoat-Amory.

Iain also asked his readers who should be Chancellor in the "next Conservative Government." Without necessarily conceding that this is anything more than a purely hypothetical question, I voted for Vincent Cable, as he is head and shoulders over anyone else David Cameron could choose.

What price loyalty?

Iain Dale reports that the former Lib Dem candidate for Hull East in 2005 has joined the Tories, bringing the total number of such defections since the last election to seven.

People are entitled to change their minds, of course, but what I find hard to believe is that political parties so regularly display such lamentable judgement in selecting parliamentary candidates whose loyalty to their cause is so evidently skin-deep. That the Lib Dems managed to be hoodwinked seven times in this way when selecting its 2005 slate speaks volumes.

There are thousands of loyal footsoldiers out there who support the same party for decades and never even get asked to stand for their local school governing body, yet these shallow, opportunistic shysters manage to get themselves selected to stand for Parliament even though their only loyalty is to their own careers.

Am I the only person who feels this way when I read of these tales of treachery?

Prophetic witness

At a time when one wing of the Church of England spends most of its time banging on about homosexuality while the other advocates the introduction of Sharia Law in the UK, I was pleased to discover that Lambeth Palace has launched a campaign to help people avoid excessive levels of personal debt and to emphasise that the Christian faith encourages a philosophy of "enough is enough", rather than seeking ever-increasing wealth.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear from the Church in response to those who claim that the teachings of Jesus no longer have any relevance to modern life.

As Dr John Preston, the Church of England’s Resources and Stewardship Officer, and co-author of Matter of Life and Debt resources, said: “It is right for the Church of England to speak out on the issue of consumer debt, as money, wealth and possessions are mentioned in the Bible more than 2,400 times."

He might have added (so I will) that that is about 100 times more often than homosexuality.

Talking Balls

One of the most entertaining blog threads I have read over the past day or two arose from this post on Political Betting in which Mike Smithson posits the idea of Ed Balls as the next leader of the Labour Party. By the time it came to my attention, there were already 200-odd comments on the thread, so I thought I would give my thoughts here instead.

Part of what makes PB.com one of the few truly great UK blogs is Mike's habit of posing questions about unlikely political outcomes. Recent examples have included: What would happen if John McCain died before the Republican Convention, and could Al Gore yet emerge as the Democratic candidate if their August convention is deadlocked.

Although these are the kind of long-odds scenarios which fascinate betting types, they are not serious political questions. For the Democrats to turn to a loser like Gore when it has two potential winners in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be a bit like the FA being unable to decide between Capello and Mourinho for England manager, and turning to Kevin Keegan instead.

The idea of Ed Balls as Prime Minister almost falls into the same category. To my mind, and that of many other observers both inside and outside the Labour Party, it is a manifest absurdity. But it is nevertheless apparent - not least from this Sunday Telegraph piece, that it is an idea to which some very influential people are giving serious consideration.

The theory is predicated on Gordon Brown winning the next election, promoting Balls to Chancellor, and building him up as the natural and obvious successor before handing over at some point in the next Parliament. The Telegraph piece suggests the current "obvious successor," David Miliband, does not really want the job, although I don't think that can necessarily be deduced from his failure to challenge Gordon last year.

Why, then, do I take the view that Balls is inconceivable as Labour leader and Prime Minister? Well, it's certainly nothing personal. Whenever I dealt with Ed Balls in my Lobby days - usually when he was doing the post-Budget briefing from the Press Gallery - he was no less courteous or helpful to me than any other lobby hack.

It's more an issue that I - and others - have with his extremely aggressive personal style. While this was a useful if occasionally counter-productive trait for a spin doctor seeking to ensure his master's key message got across, it always struck me as ill-befitting a frontline political role, and it does not surprise me in the least that Balls's TV appearances have invariably been so catastrophic.

The fact that Balls is being seriously spoken of as a potential Prime Minister is probably indicative of the lack of real talent in the much-vaunted younger generation of Cabinet ministers. They are all either too geeky (the Milibands), too lightweight (Purnell, Burnham) or, in the case of Balls and Douglas Alexander, much better cast as backroom boys.

The one exception, and the one current member of the Cabinet who, in my view, has both the intellect and the emotional intelligence to be a successful political leader in the 21st century is Balls' wife, Yvette Cooper, although I also think there are two more outside the current Cabinet in Jon Cruddas and Alan Milburn.

So far as Cooper is concerned, the question to my mind is not whether she could do the job, but whether her overweeningly arrogant and ambitious other half will let her.