Can Ed Balls leave his past behind?

A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when Andrew Neil pointed out that Labour was — contrary to Balls’s earlier denials — running a structural deficit in 2007, Balls got into a long-winded attempt to justify both that and his denial of this point last year.