When Ed Balls arrived at his new department on Thursday he suddenly found
that, for once in his life, he didn’t know where he was going. Apart from
up, that is.
As he approached the lift in the glass atrium with his new cabinet portfolio
he realised nobody had told him which floor his new office was on. “I didn’t
know which button to press,” he joked on Friday night during an interview
with The Sunday Times.
The 40-year-old MP for Nor-manton has just been given the job of secretary of
state at the new Department for Children, Schools and Families. He has a big
pile of paperwork on his new desk on the seventh floor. With his suit jacket
slung over a big swivel chair, there is much work to be done in his newly
created empire. Balls had better start learning which buttons to press
pretty fast.
Finally, after years in the shadows as Gordon Brown’s fixer-in-chief, Balls
has a chance to win his spurs commanding a great spending department. What’s
more his superministry’s wide responsibilities will allow him to champion
policies that most concern middle-class voters targeted by David Cameron.
Alongside David Miliband, the foreign secretary, he is the leader of the
cabinet’s new young generation, but unlike Miliband who will have to operate
in the shadow of No 10 he may have more freedom of action. Balls admits his
task is “quite daunting”.
There was no greater reminder of the responsibilities of state than when
Brown’s new team “of all talents” met on Friday as police sirens sounded
chaos across London after two car bombs were discovered.
“I’ve been in the cabinet room lots of times over the years but I’d never seen
anything like this,” Balls said. “You are all huddled together and the shape
of the cabinet table becomes very important. It was strange with all the
helicopters hovering outside, toing and froing from the Haymarket. You feel
the responsibility.”
Balls may look haggard around the eyes and still be in the office late on a
Friday night, but he is brimming with youthful enthusiasm.
His department has been created from the old Department for Education and
Skills being split in two. But after years as Brown’s chief economic adviser
at the Treasury, and then minister for the City, Balls also has the task of
delivering the whole of the government’s primary and secondary education
programme.
His “broad children and family” responsibilities also include child obesity,
the “respect” agenda, youth crime and antisocial behaviour, and the Sure
Start programme, which helps small children from poor backgrounds and their
parents.
Balls’s power stems from his close relationship with Gordon and his political
acumen. Barely a day has not gone by in the past 15 years when the pair have
not spoken, both of them waking up thinking how to hammer the Tories. This
will not change and Balls believes that the lift-off from Tony Blair’s exit
and the installation of “Team Brown” is the perfect opportunity to see off
David Cameron.
But does Balls think a break with the Blair era is now essential and why all
this talk of change when Brown has been at the helm over domestic policy for
10 years already? “It is a new prime minister and pretty much everybody in
the cabinet has changed jobs,” he says. “Over the last year we have pulled
off a stable and orderly transition that many people said could not be done.”
So where does he think it all went wrong for Blair? “I think what happened was
that as the government had gone into this third term, the public felt we
weren’t focusing enough on what was their priorities and what they actually
wanted to know was: are we making the schools better, are we focusing on
hospitals you can rely on, are we focusing on make the streets safer?
“I think we weren’t talking enough about these things. What we will see, when
we talk about change, is we are going to listen more.”
We have, of course, heard all this before from the government over the years.
The difference now, Balls says, is that there will no longer be the
distraction of talk of rifts at the top of government. Team Brown is unified.
“In the end, the fact that all of politics came to be seen through the prism
of the Blair-Brown transition was quite debilitating for the government and
turned the public off. It gave the impression, too, that there must be a
divide here, there must be an ideological rift.”
For all that, he blazes when we put to him Blair’s contention that “the
default mode of the British people is to vote Conservative”. He prefers his
master’s vision of a progressive consensus. “I think [Blair] is wrong about
that. I think the British public is very wise and discerning about politics
and they see through people who pose as one thing and are actually the
other.” So in that respect is the charge against Cameron that he truly is
the heir to Blair?
But to dispel talk of splits Brown and Balls have not only embraced Blair’s
flagship city academy programme but also the minister who dreamt it up, Lord
Adonis. Balls says he knows him well and likes him. It will be an intriguing
mix of two ferociously bright people.
The signs are that there will be a “Brown bounce”. No 10 was buoyed yesterday
by a poll showing that Labour is in its strongest position since Cameron
became Tory leader. Balls says now Labour is united, the “heat is on” for
Cameron.
“The whole thing about the Blair/Brown paradigm is that it let David Cameron
off the hook. He wasn’t the story. He could sit back in prime minister’s
questions and be a spectator or a commentator. Suddenly the question is what
does he stand for and where is his party and is the centre of gravity of his
party in tune with the public’s priorities,” he digs.
“He has got this real dilemma,” says Balls. “Does he try to stick with the
mainstream [now that] the spotlight has shifted onto him and will expose the
vision of his party; or does he try to unify his party in the knowledge that
it shifts his party substantially to the right?”
A tactician to his fingertips, he believes this dilemma was evident in the
recent Tory row over grammar schools, when Cameron had to back down on plans
to halt the creation of new grammars. Balls believes that housing is now
another “wedge” issue that will divide the Tories – does Cameron support
government plans to build more “affordable” homes or will the Tory leader
cave in to local Conservative councils (and their nervous Tory MPs) who
oppose more house-build-ing in their backyard?
Balls’s other half just happens to be Yvette Cooper, the housing minister and
MP for Pontefract and Castleford.
But the former minister for the City is adamant that the government should not
bow to the populist clamour for clipping the wings of the new superclass of
private equity dealers and nondoms. They pay little or no tax in Britain.
“We are a small country in an open global world and we face some realities we
can’t change,” he argues. “There is no sense in railing against the global
nature of investment and the fact that finance can move from one country to
another at the flick of a switch and doing things that would put at risk of
leadership of those things.”
The Balls/Brown big tent covers Big Capital as well as the unemployed and the
poor. It unsettles the Tories too. He pours scorn on George Osborne, the
shadow chancellor, for trying to “outflank the government on the left” by
announcing a review of private equity in the pages of the Financial Times.
“Playing politics in that kind of way is a pretty dangerous thing to do.”
Perish the thought, Ed.
But what of those poor children, often from broken homes, revealed by a recent
survey to lag a year behind their affluent contemporaries by the age of
three? Balls talks passionately of the Sure Start scheme to help young
mothers with nursery care, debt advice and health services. He wants a
“preventative agenda around youth disadvantage” to act on early warning
signals when children, especially boys, are going off the rails.
Indeed we all do, but the government has been talking about these problems for
10 years. By loading on him huge responsibilities for keeping the underclass
on the straight and narrow as well as raising school standards Brown has set
his prize pupil his hardest test.
Child obesity, the “respect†agenda, youth crime and antisocial behaviour are all problems which arose over the past ten years - part of the Blair legacy. Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequor throughout that time and as one of the architects of New Labour he cannot in all honesty claim excuplability.
Proclaiming that Balls will clean up his mess is absolutely hypocritical.
Rick, London , England
Here we go again. Let's all mess about with Education, confuse everyone, disenfranchise the kids then change the staff and move on. Nothing ever changes.
Judy , Liverpool, england