Balls on Brown

I laughed to myself at the comments made by the Labour shadow chancellor the other day - Ed Balls.

Ed gave an interview to The Times newspaper in which he suggested that his former boss - Gordon Brown - will never been seen as a great Prime Minister suggesting that he had lost touch with reality.

Now this re-writing of history conveniently skates over the fact that Ed Balls was one of Gordon Brown's main attack dogs for years - along with Charlie Whelan and Damien McBride.

So it seems more than a bit hypocritical tome that the shadow chancellor should try to distance himself so obviously - from his great mentor - for whom he acted as an uncritical friend and chief cheerleader at the time.

Anyway, here is Balls on Brown:

"I spent a lot of time with somebody for whom not being the leader was the most important thing. It’s unbelievably debilitating to your life, to your relationships, to everything."

Balls goes on to say that Brown saw problems, not solutions everywhere he looked, before adding:

"Nobody is going to look back at any point in history and say that Gordon Brown was a great prime minister, but I think they will look back and say the leadership Gordon and Alistair [Darling] demonstrated on the world stage in 2007-08 was of monumental significance. That is known around the world, just less so here in Britain."

Now I happen to think the last point is probably fair - that having helped to create the unholy economic mess the country got itself into - Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling then prevented the banks from going into complete meltdown.

Alistair Darling I think deserves the more credit of the two - and regular readers will remember that Gordon Brown then tried to replace Alistair Darling with none other than Ed Balls - in the run up to the 2010 general election.

But Alistair Darling refused to be bullied and made it clear that he would not accept another cabinet post - that he would go to the back benches if the Prime Minister replaced him as Labour Chancellor with one of his key henchmen - i.e. Ed Balls.

Who said politics is a dirty old business?

Because whoever it was - they were absolutely right.