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Gordon Brown’s trusted lieutenant for sixteen years, Ed Balls surprised nobody when he entered the race to succeed him as Leader of the Labour Party in 2010.
He said he wanted to “hear what the public have to say” and didn’t want the election to be seen through the “old prism” of Blair and Brown; but his reputation as a Brownite bruiser has followed him through the campaign.
He secured the backing of thirty-three MPs and the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. The author Ken Follett donated £100,000 to his campaign. But he failed to win the backing of any of the three largest trade unions.
In July there were unconfirmed rumours that he was considering quitting the race and backing David Miliband, but he carried on.
As Brown’s economic adviser, confidant and mouthpiece since 1994 and chief economic adviser to the Treasury from 1999, he had long been seen as the power behind the fiscal throne, with a major influence on policy. He was once described as the most powerful unelected person in Britain.
He gave up his job in 2005 to become, briefly, a backbench MP. But within a year he was back in Brown’s team as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and within two years was in Brown’s Cabinet.
Many of the correspondents he had briefed on his boss’s Budgets and financial statements prophesied that he would one day be delivering a Budget himself. He was even tipped for Chancellor of the Exchequer when Brown became Prime Minister.
He was duly promoted straight into the Cabinet, but in the new job of Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.
Two years later Brown wanted to make him Chancellor to replace Alistair Darling. But Darling refused to budge and Brown, fearing more high-profile resignations, dared not remove him. So Balls stayed where he was.
His new Department had already annexed several functions from other ministries: the ‘Respect agenda’ from the Home Office, and joint responsibility for youth justice, child poverty, children’s health and youth sport.
He soon brought his economics background to bear in the classroom with plans to introduce a new subject, economic wellbeing and financial capability, into all secondary schools.
As the Government piled up its borrowing, he wanted to teach children how to manage their money, and debts. He announced compulsory cookery classes in secondary schools to teach an obese generation about healthy eating.
He announced a new series of diplomas in academic and vocational subjects which he said could eventually replace A-levels, an idea that received a mixed response from universities.
In 2005 he finally landed the Parliamentary seat of Normanton in West Yorkshire which he had long coveted, not least because his wife, Yvette Cooper was MP for next-door Pontefract and Castleford.
But in 2006 he failed in his High Court challenge to the Boundary Commission’s plans to abolish the seat. Ironically, parts of it were absorbed into his wife’s constituency.
So he faced a contest with his neighbour Colin Challen for the new seat of Morley and Outwood, which includes part of old Normanton. Challen first said he would fight, but suddenly threw in the towel in January 2007.
As one of the young Turks urging Brown to call an early general election in 2007, and publicly talking up the prospects, he shared some of the criticism when the election was called off.
The Conservatives targeted the seat with the hope of decapitation, or as they put it, in his case, “castration” of a prominent Labour Minister. But he narrowly held the seat against a swing of nearly 10 per cent, and denied the television cameras a “Portillo moment”.
During the campaign he was fined £60 and given three penalty points for using a mobile phone while driving.
Born in Norwich in 1967, son of a scientist, grandson of a lorry driver, Ed Balls was privately educated at Nottingham High School and read philosophy, politics and economics at Keble College, Oxford, where he says he didn’t do much work for the first two years, concentrating on football and politics.
But he got his first-class honours, at the same time as David Cameron, and moved on to a Kennedy scholarship at Harvard, where he became a teaching fellow for a year. He was the economic leader and feature writer for the Financial Times, which constantly urged independence for the Bank of England over interest rates, a case he made in 1992 in a Fabian Society pamphlet.
In 1994, when his employers thwarted his ambition to spend a couple of years in Africa to write about its economic plight, he took his custom elsewhere, and left to work for the then Shadow Chancellor.
Labour’s victory in 1997 put him at the centre of power and influence. Within days Brown had granted independence to the Bank of England over interest rates.
His close partnership with Brown had one of its lighter moments when Balls wrote a reference to “the growth of post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory” into one of Brown’s speeches. It won the Plain English Campaign’s foot-in-mouth award, and Conservatives joked: “It wasn’t Brown’s, it was Balls!” He owned up to authorship in his maiden speech.
He was closely involved in Brown’s frequent battles with Tony Blair, for whom he had little regard. The biographer Anthony Selden claimed he accused Brown of pulling back from a bid to topple Blair in May 2006. Balls denied the allegation. He was also accused of masterminding a smear operation inside Downing Street to destabilise rivals.
He formed another very New Labour partnership, with another bright young Oxford and Harvard scholar and economic journalist, Yvette Cooper, who preceded him both as a Treasury adviser and as an MP. Their wedding in 1998 was the social event of the Blairite, or rather Brownite, year. They had their third child in 2004 and became the first husband-and-wife team to sit in Cabinet together.
In 2007 the couple attracted press criticism for registering their house in north London, where their children go to school, as their second home, thus enabling them to claim up to £44,000 a year for it in parliamentary allowances.
Even as a civil servant Balls was accused of straying into the political arena. He made regular speeches about economic policy, which were immediately interpreted as either his master’s voice, or soon to become it.
In early 2004 he called for a pre-emptive strike in monetary policy, a comment criticised as an apparent call to the Bank of England to put up interest rates, which it duly did.
He has his detractors: one Whitehall insider was reported as saying, “Ed Balls is nearly as clever as he thinks he is.” Some see him as acerbic and confrontational and he faced some criticism over his handling of the row over pensions. The Labour chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, Barry Sheerman described him as “a bit of a bully”.
He has written a number of books on economic reform, gives regular lectures, and was senior research fellow with the Smith Institute (in memory of the late John Smith) for a year before his election.
In his brief career as a backbencher he was a regular contributor in the Chamber, mixing local topics with high economics. He initiated an adjournment debate on boosting enterprise in the Wakefield area. He is a frequent guest on radio and television programmes, though his performances have been patchy.
Since the general election he has scored points against the new Education Secretary Michael Gove over his botched announcement of school building cuts.
He plays the fiddle and still writes occasionally for the Financial Times. He lists his other recreation as playing football with his children.
Article Comments
Intellectually and politically Ed Balls is Labour's best chance by far of holding the coalition government to account. He has scored almost all of the direct hits on them so far, especially against Michael Gove, so whether one agrees with all his policies or not it will be good for British democracy to have him leading Labour through to the next election.
Martin Carter
6th Sep 2010 at 9:08 pm
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