Earlier, Balls was one of the main partisans for Brown in his struggle to wrest the Labour leadership from Blair. He was part of a team, including Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride, notorious for the nastiness of their attacks on anyone who stood in Brown’s way. While Ed Miliband, another member of the Brown team, was described as “the ambassador from Planet Fucker” by Blairites for his diplomacy and relative benignness in his dealings with them, Balls was a fully-paid-up Planet Fuckerian.
The culture did not improve once Brown was installed as Prime Minister. In Speaking Out, Balls acknowledges that at times “the atmosphere inside Number Ten was poisonous” and that frequently “Gordon was lashing out”. Members of the Brown entourage briefed against each other constantly — although Balls claims he himself was innocent of this. The culture of abuse which now pervades Labour, with the ad hominem attacks on moderate MPs by Corbynistas, has its origins in an era in which Corbyn was just a quaint, isolated backbencher.
Balls can also be blamed for reintroducing the language of class hatred into the Labour lexicon. Blair and Peter Mandelson had done their very best to expunge such attitudes — indeed, Mandelson had famously stated that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Balls believed that making an issue out of Cameron and Osborne being out-of-touch posh boys would have great resonance with the electorate. Balls himself is not from a working-class background — his father is a prominent academic and he and his siblings were educated at fee-paying schools. He seems to have miscalculated here in that the differences between his own background and that of Cameron and Osborne are abundantly clear to himself but may well be lost on much of the electorate, for whom they are all an alien species.
Balls’s attacks, however, laid the foundations for what has followed. He may have no sympathy for what the Corbynistas are doing, but his own rhetoric helped to create a fertile environment in which they could flourish — and which is now helping to tear Labour apart.
The culture did not improve once Brown was installed as Prime Minister. In Speaking Out, Balls acknowledges that at times “the atmosphere inside Number Ten was poisonous” and that frequently “Gordon was lashing out”. Members of the Brown entourage briefed against each other constantly — although Balls claims he himself was innocent of this. The culture of abuse which now pervades Labour, with the ad hominem attacks on moderate MPs by Corbynistas, has its origins in an era in which Corbyn was just a quaint, isolated backbencher.
Balls can also be blamed for reintroducing the language of class hatred into the Labour lexicon. Blair and Peter Mandelson had done their very best to expunge such attitudes — indeed, Mandelson had famously stated that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Balls believed that making an issue out of Cameron and Osborne being out-of-touch posh boys would have great resonance with the electorate. Balls himself is not from a working-class background — his father is a prominent academic and he and his siblings were educated at fee-paying schools. He seems to have miscalculated here in that the differences between his own background and that of Cameron and Osborne are abundantly clear to himself but may well be lost on much of the electorate, for whom they are all an alien species.
Balls’s attacks, however, laid the foundations for what has followed. He may have no sympathy for what the Corbynistas are doing, but his own rhetoric helped to create a fertile environment in which they could flourish — and which is now helping to tear Labour apart.
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