Interview: former MP Ed Balls on Strictly, Theresa May and why Labour has lost the plot

When Jeremy Corbyn’s victory was announced, Ed Balls was getting spangled up for Strictly. Here he talks about his ‘surreal’ new life after politics, how to save Labour and eating Gordon Brown’s oysters
Shiny disco Balls: former shadow chancellor Ed Balls
The Guardian/Richard Saker
Charlotte Edwardes26 September 2016

Ed Balls, a former Secretary of State, Celebrity Bake Off runner-up and current chair of Norwich City FC, was rehearsing for Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday as news of the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader ricocheted around Twitter. The “wardrobe guys” were humming and hawing over his costume: a sad, spangle-less suit with a sad, un-twinkling shirt. “They thought it looked a bit ‘BBC insurance person making sure everyone was going to pass health and safety rules’,” says Balls. “At the last minute we decided I needed to be spangled up.”

So off he was dispatched to the sequin room where an army of dressmakers gave him the full coruscating overhaul for the live broadcast at 6.30pm. He emerged buoyant — though, as the underdog, he polled last.

Balls, 49, threw himself into Strictly with the same force he exerted in 20 years as a political heavyweight. At times — when he explains the “muscle strain”, the “physical contact” and sheer technical difficulty of “moving my shoulders on their own” — I fear he’ll never talk politics again. But once he’s stated his Strictly aims — “What I am not going to do be is a joker, not the John Sergeant or Ann Widdecombe: I wanted to learn to dance and my professional partner Katya is quite hot on not being second best” — we focus on Labour’s crisis.

We meet at his dance rehearsal studio in Old Street. It smells of jockstraps and yoga mats but Balls is showered and radiating health. His politics are those Corbynistas deride as “Blairite/Brownite neoliberal scum”, so it’s no secret that there is little love lost between him and the far Left. But as a part-time academic (he is a visiting professor at King’s College, London, as well as a fellow at Harvard) his critique of the Corbyn leadership is forensic.

“Corbyn has some big choices,” he says, “about the shadow cabinet elections; the attitude towards sitting MPs; the policies he chooses; how he deals with discipline, abuse and party staff. I hope he makes the right ones. In the end it is a political party. If your message is ‘the BBC is part of corrupt Right-wing establishment, the voters who don’t agree with us are wrong, and any critic within the Labour Party is in fact a Tory neoliberal’ your chances of being Prime Minister are doomed.”

The biggest problem for Corbyn is that his support is “so disconnected” from voters. “Corbyn represents the views of those who joined Labour since 2015, views that tend to be 100 per cent at odds with Left-leaning voters.”

Does Labour feel like a fan club? “There is definitely some of that,” he says, “but it’s more hard-headed: people from the Socialist Party or Greens who saw the opportunity with Corbyn to pull Labour into an extreme position. Until now we’d had an electoral college balanced by trade unions, MPs and party members. If you scrap that and the membership shifts to the Left, this is the outcome.”

Team work: Ed with his Strictly Come Dancing partner Katya Jones
PA

Corbyn “is not where the country is”. What Balls hears is that “people are really frustrated that Labour has lost the plot. Go to a Corbyn rally in Islington and there are people there who think Labour has found the plot. But the vast majority who need a Labour government have never been to a rally. They are too busy holding down jobs, looking after kids. They see a cheering rally that backs leaving Nato and think: ‘What’s going on?’ Jeremy thinks that by saying ‘I’m really worried about inequality’ he can connect. What people actually want to know is, ‘Where are the jobs?’ and ‘How are you going to make the sums add up?’”

That said, Balls doesn’t advocate a split. He argues instead that moderates such as Yvette Cooper, his wife of 18 years, and Chuka Umunna need to take a long-term view. “The centre-Left has to persuade members who joined in 2015 that being electable is important. Or they have to recruit members in the way Corbyn and the far-Left have done in the past 18 months. They have to show there is a credible mainstream Labour voice.”

As his conviction becomes stronger, Balls becomes more animated. If a colleague hadn’t seen him crying in the street shortly after he lost his seat last year, I might never have believed he could get so down. But once he stops the platitudes about how great it was to have more time for kids and cakes, he does give me a glimpse of how he really felt.

For five months he didn’t play the piano (he famously took it up at 45) “because that was so emotionally wrapped up with before”. Nor did he go near Parliament. “I hardly saw anybody.” He was offered a job that fell through and speaking roles he couldn’t do because, “Well, what would I say?”

Instead he accepted the post of senior fellow at Harvard. But when he arrived in Massachusetts it felt like a “crisis”. “I hadn’t been there since I was a 21-year-old student. Suddenly I was back, thinking: ‘The only thing that has really changed here is me’.”

October last year, he admits, was particularly black. “I woke up at 7am in an anodyne hotel room thinking: ‘My God what am I doing here?” Back home, the Tory Party conference was thundering on, triumphant. Balls tuned in. “George Osborne was doing his speech announcing Andrew Adonis to chair a commission on infrastructure — which I’d advocated for five years. The person who beat me [for his seat Morley and Outwood] was on the platform. I was alone in this anonymous place thinking: ‘What a strange point my life has come to’.”

Arguably it’s not much less strange a year now, what with Balls spinning a 27-year-old Russian dancer around in front of a live audience of 10 million. But he’s certainly happier now. He describes this year as “odd and surreal”.

Strictly Come Dancing 2016 - dance partners

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Which might also be how you could describe being picked in 1994 to work for Gordon Brown as a fresh-faced Oxford graduate and Financial Times journalist.

On one occasion he was asked to Cannes, “to play tennis with the shadow chancellor and talk to him about politics”. When he arrived, Sheena Macdonald, Brown’s then girlfriend, hadn’t left. “So Gordon, Sheena and I spent a couple of days in the South of France. I did feel a bit of a gooseberry.”

Brown decided they should have dinner in the “most fancy, most exclusive hotel”, the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes. “But once there we realised no one had a wallet,” Balls remembers. “We could only afford sparkling water and an omelette. Suddenly we heard: ‘Gordon!’ ‘It was Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson. Fry had absconded from the London theatre and they’d both dyed their hair blonde because there’s this big thing in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden about dyeing your hair with lemon juice on a summer trip. They came over to sit with the three of us with three forks and one omelette.”

On another night Brown insisted Balls eat 20 oysters on a set menu because he didn’t like oysters but the French waiter wouldn’t bring the steak until they’d been finished.

Ambitious: Theresa May
PA

Was Gordon volatile as a boss? “I never saw that — hardly saw that,” Balls corrects himself. “All politicians — Tony, Gordon, Neil Kinnock — at times become tense, because that’s how you’re creative. Every now and again there would be passion.”

“Passion” included typing “with great energy”. Balls does an impression, two fingers drumming furiously on the table-top. “So the keyboards took a pounding.” Was he himself ever menacing? “I’m the opposite. I never shouted.”

The moments of “long reflection” after he lost his seat were translated into Speaking Out, his new book. George Osborne was a guest at the launch.

Did Theresa May made a mistake in sacking Osborne? “It’s easy to have a clearout,” Balls says, “but the question is whether it’s a sign of strength. I’m not sure. If I’d been Theresa May I’d have thought: ‘I’ve got a majority of 12 and I need a broad church. I don’t want to rely on Liam Fox and David Davis.’ I might’ve wanted to work more closely with some of the talented people. It may be that she sacked in haste and will repent at leisure.”

What upsets Balls is that at a time when we have “a Prime Minister that doesn’t know what she thinks, the Opposition should be doing its job. May’s only saving grace is that Labour is a mess. They won’t give her a hard time.”

He sighs: “I feel guilty I’m not doing my bit, that I’m just doing a dancing show.” Yesterday, at least, he motored up the M62 to do a Q&A at the Labour conference.

That said, he can’t help but return to Strictly. “There was a fabulous tweet from William Hill saying they were aghast someone in Yorkshire had put £15 on me to win,” he chuckles. “They said, ‘No, no! Even at the odds we’re offering he’s set to be the worst dancer in the history of the programme.’ I thought that was a bit harsh.”

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