Ed balls

The overnight briefing of Ed Balls' speech to the Fabian Society's annual conference was that the Shadow Chancellor would make a binding fiscal commitment to balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament. Which sounded like a mighty eleventh-hour repentance until you looked at the detail. Ed Miliband has spent the past few months trying to sound like a dry old bean counter by saying Labour wouldn't borrow more for day-to-day spending, which really means Labour won't borrow any more for revenue spending but can splurge all it likes on capital expenditure. And so Ed Balls has done the same today: the 'surplus on the current budget' is the same as 'day-to-day spending': it's the revenue, not the capital budget.

Today’s PMQs has left Ed Miliband with a strategic headache. Miliband’s new less-Punch and Judy approach to PMQs isn’t working. In large part, this is because Cameron — who thinks he wins more of these sessions than he loses and that the facts on the ground now favour him — isn’t interested in cooperating. So Miliband is faced with the choice of continuing with this approach and being beaten up every Wednesday or abandoning it after just two sessions. If Miliband does continue with it, expect to see the Tories continue to try to goad Ed Balls, one of the Commons’ most enthusiastic hecklers, into responding to them in kind — note how Cameron took repeated jabs at the ‘newly silent shadow Chancellor’.

With the economy recovering and Labour floundering, it was a poor PMQs yesterday for Ed Miliband. And the source of his trouble was sitting right next to him – his own Shadow Chancellor. After a disastrous response to the Autumn Statement, Ed Miliband is rumoured to have given Ed Balls nine months to sort out Labour’s economic policy. Clearly riled, Ed Balls has given an interview to the FT this morning, the raison d’etre explicitly being to try and regain some credibility on the economy. And so, somewhat wearily, we have the re-announcement of a ‘zero-based spending review’, six months on from its first outing in June. Try as Balls may, if we needed any reminding that Labour have nothing to say on the economy, this interview certainly does the job.

Christmas is excellent news for a Labour opposition. The season of goodwill throws rich and poor into sharp relief. Red-faced aldermen gather at loaded tables to gobble up roast goose and plum-duff. And afterwards they throw sixpences at starving chimney-sweeps who scrabble for crusts of bread in the snow. At least that’s how it should be. But Labour is in trouble this year. A dearth of bad news has gripped the country. There’s a chronic shortage of shortages. And the lack of a serious crisis is reaching crisis proportions. Ed Miliband is suffering. He looked positively nauseous as he stood up at PMQs and applauded the ‘welcome’ fall in joblessness. ‘More!’ shouted the Tories. Miliband’s lips curled queasily.

Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, gave an abortive performance in response to the Autumn Statement last week; he blamed his embarrassment on the cacophony of jeers from the Tory benches. You might have thought that Balls would lay low this week. Not a bit of it. There he was chanting 'Dave, Dave, Dave' and testing his new hand gesture, which is simply to point downwards. ‘He can dish it out but he can't take it,’ said the PM. Cameron is easily riled by Balls; but he went in for the kill this time: ‘I'll tell you what's going down: his career’. It wasn't a great line; but the fact that Ed Miliband was openly laughing at the gag should concern the dwindling forces in the Balls camp.

There were two key lessons from Treasury Questions today. The first is about Labour's post-autumn statement line of attack. We already knew from Ed Balls' briefing last Thursday that he feels cost of living is still a valid debate for the next year, while ministers want to talk about credibility and the need for a credible government to finish the job. But today he wove that together with the government's claims about the cost of living, arguing that ministers had fudged their figures to claim that living standards are improving. He said: 'Let me ask the Chief Secretary: on Thursday the Chancellor claimed in this House that living standards are rising. On Friday the institute for Fiscal Studies said that living standards are falling. So who's right?

Generally when someone says they 'couldn't give a toss' about something, you can safely bet more than 50p and a cake that it's the most important thing ever to them. So when Ed Balls told Sky's Murnaghan programme today that he 'couldn't give a toss' about speculation that Ed Miliband might move him, it meant a number of things. The first is, of course, that he could give a toss, but frankly it would be weird if the Shadow Chancellor didn't care whether or not he continued in his job. Anyone answering that question honestly would have to admit that they jolly well do give a toss about whether they're going to lose their job or not.

Ed Balls has not had a good day. He has just given his post-autumn statement briefing, at which he argued that Labour had set the agenda for this statement with Ed Miliband's energy price freeze pledge. He's right, but as James explained in his blog, while Labour set the terms of debate for the autumn, the Tories have just set the agenda for the winter. The autumn was about the cost of living and energy prices, now the winter will be about credibility. This of course assumes that the Conservatives follow up a good day today with an aggressive campaign over the next few weeks. That has not always been a given, but CCHQ is getting better at driving home clear messages, and MPs and ministers are growing more confident about popping up on the airwaves to defend the government.