Matthew Dancona
Following a dividing line to oblivion
In his article, Balls scorns those in whose own party who believe that this approach has outlived its usefulness and savages the media for failing to subject Cameron’s Tories to proper scrutiny. He then challenges Michael Gove on a number of points, seeking to prove that, beneath the Cameroon shininess, the Tory Party remains a gang of evil dismantlers of the state.
The trouble with this is that Balls is posing the wrong question. Everyone knows that public spending is going to have to be reined in, thanks to the nation’s insane indebtedness, and, as Coffee House and Fraser’s magazine pieces have constantly pointed out, that reality holds good for Labour as well as the Tories. Alistair Darling admitted as much in his FT interview on Friday. Only the PM and Balls cling to the nonsense of Labour bounty versus wicked Tory parsimony.
Jackie Ashley makes the crucial point: nobody will buy this, from Balls or anyone else, and so the election will become an argument about character (why is Labour lying?) rather than policy (who would govern the country best?). I doubt the Schools Secretary, denied the top job at the Treasury in the reshuffle, will pay her much heed. His Guardian piece, cosmetically a call for unity, is also his own statement of intent for the post-Brown world. David Miliband set out some of his stall in a Guardian interview on Saturday. Now his deadliest rival has thrown his hat in the ring. Brown still sits on the throne, but he is what the French call a roi fainéant: king in name only. The race for the succession is already on.