UPDATE: Didn’t I just tell you? Scroll down to the last para….
I predict, right here and now, that Alan Johnson will be the next leader of the Labour party. I’m even willing to put a fiver on it, as I did on John Major, and I was right about him too.
So why, you may ask, am I featuring a picture of Ed “So what?” Balls? Because if anything’s likely to cause the final implosion of Gordon Brown’s government and a change of Labour leadership it’s Gordo’s weakness for Balls and his desperate hanging onto the 10p tax rate cut to prove his virility.
I can’t deny I wish I’d seen the alleged bustup, as reported by the Telegraph, between Balls and Demon Headmaster/ Justice Secretary Jack Straw, if the other intra-Labour party scraps I’ve seen in local government and the unions are any guide, if only for the chuckles.
In my experience they’re vicious rather than violent, and if they do get physical it’s actually quite pathetic – much pushing and grunting or flapping ineffectually at each other until someone intervenes. Rarely it’s an actual fistfight, unless someone’s knocking off the other’s partner or similar and/or enough intoxicants have been consumed to remove inhibition. (But I can’t see it, or maybe I just don’t want to: any sexual combo of Straw, and/or Ed Balls and fellow cabinet minister and partner Yvette Cooper doesn’t bear thinking about. For god’s sake, the mental picture of Straw and Condi Rice was bad enough.)
Straw has a massively inflated ego, as befits a former Stalinist and Friend of Presidents so I’m inclined to think it was Straw having the hissyfit if David Blunkett’s diary is to be relied upon:
June 2001
The most bizarre part of the day was a conversation with Jack Straw [who] asked if officials could put their telephones down – civil servants routinely listen in to conversations between ministers regarding formal government business – so that we could talk privately. He then launched into this tirade about my having wanted his job and what had happened on the day of the launch of the manifesto. I said: “Hang on, Jack, you know perfectly well that it was No 10 – it was nothing to do with me.” In fact Estelle Morris had had the same treatment, so I suppose he could blame her for wanting my job. He then said: “You have drawn a line. It is year zero from June 7. You are overturning everything.”
I don’t think that the relationship between Jack and myself ever recovered.
If Ed Balls weren’t such a complete arse, I’d say well done for puncturing Straw’s self-important vanity.
But Balls is representative of the callousness and casual nastiness of attitude that Brown brought into office with him, as he showed during a recent budget debate on the effect that 10p tax rate would have on low earners:
The Minister had interrupted just after the Conservative leader had warned Britain was woefully ill-prepared for the troubled economic times ahead and now had the highest tax burden in our history.
Hearing Mr Balls interject, Mr Cameron replied “‘So what’, says the minister for children. I know he wants to be Chancellor so badly it hurts.
“I have to tell him – another Budget like the one we have just heard and he won’t have to wait very long.”
Later, as Mr Balls continued to shout excitably, the Tory leader added: “I know he is the minister for children, but he doesn’t have to behave like one.”
Mr Balls claimed last night that he had only said “so weak” as David Cameron was outlining the tax burden in what had escalated into an embarrassing row.
‘Great Clunking Fist’ Brown likes his men hard and he especially likes Balls – ” Friend and foe agree it was always difficult to know where Brown ended and Balls began”. The public loathes Balls, Cooper his wife and all their works, including their massive salaries and expenses. This has done Brown no good at all and he’d better beware, too; his protege may be plotting against him, at least according to the Evening Standard, whose sister paper, the Daily Mail, featured this photospread of Balls with his new BFF Andy ‘Mascara’ Burnham:
Andy and Eddie in a tree….
How much truth there is in that report I do not know, but Gordon Brown might well believe it, plagued by doubt and insecurity as he is. He’s currently, desperately, trying to salvage his own political manhood by clinging on to the 10pence tax band even though his party despises him for it.
Why they have a problem taxing the poorest I don’t know. It’s perfectly consistent with what they’ve done in government so far- I suppose it bothers them because it removes their last fig leaves of conscience.
I suppose the story could be a PR stunt by new Brown PR guru Stephen Carter, planted to flush out traitors, but again that’s unlikely given the Mail’s noted antipathy to all things Brown.
This appears to be a government just waiting to implode and Balls may just be the catalyst that starts the final chain reaction. The London mayoral election can only accelerate the process.
Don’t get your hopes up, though. It won’t mean we’ve got shut of New Labour, not unless an election is called or there’s an overwhelming vote of no confidence, and if the Labour Party needs a new leader, I doubt they’ll call a general election.They didn’t for Brown and in any case they daren’t risk it.
But who would this likely new leader be? Harriet Harman? Dawn Primarolo? Cooper herself ? Those cooing martinets of incompetence offend women and men alike. Straw? Iraq – enough said. Hillary Benn? Not unless technocracy gets sexy all of a sudden. One of the Millibands? Surely they can’t’ve finished their work experience already….
You see what I mean. Who’s left that hasn’t pissed everyone off, but Alan Johnson?
