Ed balls

On the surface, there are one or two baubles to delight a Labour supporter: their party leader has just had a second son, of course; they are pushing ahead of the Tories in a number of polls; and the coalition will surely come under sustained and heavy attack as the cuts make themselves felt. But strip back the gloss veneer, and Labour has some agonising problems to worry about. Chief among those problems – as I’ve written before – is their uncertain message on the economy, stretching into an uncertain policy prospectus overall. Just what do Labour stand for? Then there’s the simmering resentments between teams Ed and David, with

David Laws’ eagerly awaited account of the coalition negotiations contains some great lines. Peter Mandelson’s declaration on being told of the Lib Dem’s desire for a mansions that ‘surely the rich have suffered enough already’ is classic. While William Hague’s description of the Conservative party as an ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide’ is a candidate for the dictionary of quotations. But politically the thing that struck me about it most was what it tells us about Ed Balls. Balls had worked with Gordon Brown for years and had been one of the most ardent Brownite. Yet it was Balls who effectively pulled the plug on the idea of a

If Alan Johnson continues as he has started, then he may be a surlier, snarlier shadow chancellor than many of us expected. He’s got an article in today’s News of the World and an interview in The Observer – and, in both, he’s on unusually combative form. Osborne’s cuts are labelled as “deep and irresponsible,” and the VAT rise is highlighted as a measure that will affect “those on middle and low incomes the most.” Johnson even claims, with Balls-like stridency, that the coalition could drag us screaming into double-dip. And there’s more. With a disingenuousness that would impress even Gordon Brown, Johnson glowers that the coalition’s cuts are deeper

I wonder if Theresa May felt faintly apprehensive this morning. It must bad enough to awake and remember that you’re the Home Secretary, held responsible for every immigrant, every strike and every crime committed in Britain. Northern Ireland is more poisoned ministerial chalice, just. Now, she is being shadowed by Ed Balls, a ravening attack-dog liberated by the opposition. Balls has re-invented himself as a traditional Labour politician, casting himself as the champion of the working class. He says, accurately, that the poor are the victims of crime and the victims of unbridled immigration and social dislocation and his opposition will be ardently authoritarian. May will have to cut police

The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business. If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.  Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two

You can say what you like about Labour’s penchant for internal elections, but at least it makes for good, political entertainment. Tonight, the results of the shadow cabinet elections will be released, and we’ll discover which of the 49 nominees made it into the final 19. Then it will fall to Ed Miliband to force some very square pegs into the round holes on his party’s front bench. Good luck with that, Mr Miliband. According to most observers, Yvette Copper is favourite to come top – a forecast supported by a readers’ poll published on Left Foot Forward today. In the same poll, Ed Balls finished second. It rather encapsulates

After one of the many sections in Ed Balls’ speech on the economy, there was a telling moment as Ed Miliband clapped half-heartedly with a thoughtful look on his face. One could almost see him trying to work out with whether he agreed enough with what Balls was saying to make him shadow Chancellor. There are dangers in both him making Balls’ shadow Chancellor and not. If he does make Balls shadow Chancellor, then it be a Neil Kinnock and John Smith situation all over again: the leader will have ceded control over economic policy. But if he doesn’t, then he’ll have an aggrieved Balls on his hands and considering

Time is against Ed Miliband: there is a void where there should be a new shadow chancellor. The party leadership cannot refine its arguments ahead of next month’s spending review, upon which the immediate success of Miliband’s regime depends. A further problem is that all of Labour’s arguments are made in the past tense. The previous government’s economic record is defended with evangelical fervour; but each speaker is struck dumb when asked about specific future savings and plans. Alistair Darling closed his front-bench career this afternoon by saying, ‘The deficit is the result of the banking crisis – and the economic crisis that followed it. We had to take that

As soon as the first round result popped up the screen, an expert on the Labour electoral college turned to me and said ‘Ed has won’. David was not far enough ahead on first preferences to win. But it was also clear that David was likely to win MPs and members — that Ed was going to win thanks to the union vote. Now, the union vote is no longer a bloc vote. But in terms of legitimacy it is widely perceived to trail the members and MPs sections. The nature of his victory will make Ed Miliband’s task harder over the next few weeks, the Red Ed tag is