Load of Balls

I enjoyed this sketch by Simon Hoggart poking fun at Ed Balls' speech to the Labour Party conference - which appeared in yesterday's Guardian.

Perhaps we would take our Westminster politicians more seriously if fewer of them were self-serving hypocrites - but until the voters of Morley strike a blow for the rest of the country - the marvellous image of Jim Bowie at the Alamo will have to suffice.  

Ed Balls's message to Labour: we will be less useless next time – probably

The shadow chancellor, watched by an unenthusiastic Ed Miliband, listed the ways the last Labour government went wrong.


By Simon Hoggart


Ed Balls gives his speech at the Labour conference. Photograph: David Levene

As leadership bids go, it was downbeat. Not quite "vote for me, if you must" but "vote for me, in spite of everything."

Ed Balls swaggered to the lectern. Actually the Irish have a better word, dandered, which implies the same confidence, but less bravado. He resembled his old boss Gordon Brown when he was shadow chancellor. Brown always bellied up to the rostrum, as if keeping his bus pass up his backside for security reasons. Balls looked as if his money belt had gone skew-whiff just before he came on stage, and it was now too embarrassing to adjust it.

Ed Miliband tends to forget that the cameras are often on him even when he is sitting on the platform, saying nothing. So we were able to witness his lack of enthusiasm on the giant screen. At the applause moments, his hands flapped together, like two elderly plaice trying to make love.

Balls's message was, and I paraphrase: "In government we were crap. But we will be less crappy next time. Probably." Or as he put it: "We have more work to do to win back the confidence of the British people." He even provided a short list – a very short list – of things they had got wrong.

He couldn't even promise he would be with us when they entered this remedial administration in 2015. His majority in Morley was but 1,101. "I am up for the battle to come!" he said, with the same degree of – perhaps forlorn – hope as Jim Bowie at the Alamo.

Still, that's not what conferences want to hear! They want to believe, and believe the best! So he leapt into panto mode with a long list of things the last Labour government had got right, admittedly slanted to the multitudinous achievements of Gordon Brown – Bank of England independence, keeping us out of the euro. As his voice rose and accelerated, the audience began clapping and cheering, so providing the sound all public speakers long for: the applause drowning out the actual words.

Then an encomium to Ed Miliband, a leader facing up to reform! Leading from the front! The man who had single-handedly prevented our going to war in Syria! "My friend, our leader, Britain's next prime minister, Ed Miliband!"

Oh dear; our minds flew back to all those similar paeans Brown delivered to Blair, at a time when, we now know, he was plotting frantically against him, stowing the gunpowder under the palace. Or as Cherie Blair put it on a similar occasion in 2006: "That's a lie!"

Then he did a riff on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Oh dear. He should come to Dr Hoggart's popular culture clinic where he would learn that show is now a creaking 15 years old. We need new TV cliches! The Tories' kneejerk reaction? Flog It! The deficit? The Only Way Is Excess. Downturn Abbey. Strictly Come Banking.

Finally he gave us a list of the astounding successes of the next Labour government. Deficit down, banks reformed, minimum wage up, jobs for all young people. As the cheers boomed round the hall, I reflected again that New Old Labour, like New Labour, has always had difficulty distinguishing between an aspiration and an achievement.