Appearing on Daybreak this morning, Ed Miliband was inevitably asked about the email sent by his aide Torsten Bell describing Ed Balls as a “nightmare”. He replied:
It’s fair to say that people send silly emails in offices and this was one of them. Ed and I are working really well together. I’m really proud to have him as the shadow chancellor, working alongside me. He is someone who I think has been right in his criticism of the government’s economic policy and he’s also leading the way on this cost of living crisis.
He will want to prepare a condensed version of that answer for this week’s PMQs, when he can expect David Cameron to mention the incident at every opportunity.
The leak (the result of Bell accidentally copying in Tory MP James Morris rather than the Labour pollster of the same name) means that there will be even more scrutiny of Balls and Miliband’s words in an attempt to find differences between the two men.
There are genuine tensions. As I wrote yesterday, the Labour leader’s team have privately accused the shadow chancellor, who was not Miliband’s first choice for the job, of being insufficiently committed to his responsible capitalism agenda and too focused on defending the record of the last Labour government. There also differences between the pair over HS2 and the proposed third runway at Heathrow, with Balls openly favouring the latter over the former, the reverse of Miliband’s position.
But if comparisons with Blair and Brown are inevitable, they are also wide of the mark. Perhaps the most important difference is that Balls has no intention of seeking to dislodge Miliband. Unlike Brown, he was beaten in a leadership contest and is now focused on becoming Chancellor, the job for which he is supremely qualified.
The experience of the Blair-Brown fued, which both men witnessed at first hand as advisers to the Chancellor, also means that they are more conscious than they might otherwise be of the need to avoid an irrevocable split. As Miliband remarked after appointing Balls as shadow chancellor: “We have seen that movie before and had front row seats. We are determined that there will be no sequel. It was a formative experience for both of us. It is something we are absolutely determined to avoid and we will avoid.”
While tensions and differences of emphasis (hardly unusual between a leader and his shadow chancellor) are likely to remain, those Tories hoping that history will repeat itself are likely to be disappointed.
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