The Balls around Ed Miliband's ankles

Dan Hodges at the New Statesman writes that Ed Miliband should sack Ed Balls. He also suggests that Balls should distance himself from the policies of Gordon Brown.

So, let's see... the Hodges recipe for Labour's return to office is based on the theory that if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle. Well, OK. Whatever gets you through the day, old son, but we grown-ups really do have to get back to Planet Earth, now.

Ed Balls distancing himself from the policies of Gordon Brown? It simply cannot happen. Equally improbable is the idea of Miliband sacking Balls. Although, after what he did to his brother, it shouldn't be ruled out entirely.

The economic governance of Britain throughout the entire Blair-Brown era (including but not only the opaque speeches and the brazen de haut en bas lies) was all Balls.

Balls was the master and Brown his pupil. Brown has admitted openly (but only after the electorate threw him out for making the most almighty Balls-up of our economy) that he is an historian and not an economist. Fancy that! By contrast, Balls was a professional economist before entering politics which he did at Brown's insistence. A very bad economist, obviously, but an economist nevertheless, and the highly political, Labour-tribalist, non-economist Brown needed him badly. Balls devised the economic instruments by which Brown would, so he thought, achieve his socialist political objectives.

It was Balls who match-made the Brown-Prudence marriage, and once the lady had been deflowered, insisted on a quickie divorce, with all the dreadful consequences which the Labour hierarchy now admits but only through gritted teeth and only in dimly-lit, smoke-free Party rooms, when they think no outsiders are watching.

Whatever opprobrium the present Labour leadership would like to lay on the widely-hated but conveniently absent Brown, the scapegoat for their years of supine complicity in his ruinous policies, belongs equally to Balls. As indeed it does to Ed Miliband, who for many years worked hand in hand with Balls in the Treasury to enforce Balls doctrine in the name of Brown.

Balls and Miliband are conjoined twins and the country knows it. As long as either or both of them remains in a leadership position, the Labour party will be despised as an incompetent, fantasist shambles not to be allowed near sharp objects like economies.

You picked the wrong brother, Labour, and along with him, the Balls around his ankles. You need to ditch both the Eds as soon as convenient. You know it, but you daren't admit it. Not even to your sorry-arsed selves.