by Atul Hatwal

Nothing is more revealing of the emotional and political lacuna at the heart of the non-Corbyn Labour party than the veneration of Ed Balls.

It’s not just Ed Balls day. On its own that’s transitory Twitter fluff. More problematic is the way he’s viewed by so many moderates as this huge Labour presence. A lost sage, sprinkled with sparkly Strictly stardust.

His interventions are treated by MPs, former advisers, journalists and swathes of the Labour Twitterati as if he some extraordinary combination of Attlee and the Fonz. You can almost hear the giggling in the tweets gushing over him.

Labour’s problems with Jeremy Corbyn are well documented but less aired is the dire state of the alternative. In Michael Dugher’s valedictory interview with the New Statesman, explaining his reasons for standing down as an MP he said it was, “no good moderates blaming Corbyn. Labour members were lured to Corbyn out of desperation. What we offered didn’t inspire, it wasn’t radical, it was more of the same.”

Dugher is right and his long-time friend, Ed Balls, is a case study why moderates failed.

Balls was a very good economic adviser to Gordon Brown, an average performer in parliament on a good day (sometimes, as with his response to the Autumn Statement in 2014, he was atrocious), patchy on broadcast and an absolutely dreadful political strategist.

When he became shadow chancellor in early 2011, he set a benchmark for success as getting ahead of the Tories on the economy. Labour went into the 2015 election almost twenty points behind. That’s his responsibility.

He did not have the extraordinary personal journey of someone like John Prescott, from a broken home, a steward serving drinks at sea, self-educating and rising to become Deputy PM.

He did not leave an indelible legislative mark from his time in Cabinet like Barbara Castle with the equal pay act.

He was not in the eye of the financial storm in 2008, steering the nation’s economy to calm water – that was Alistair Darling.

There is no ideological legacy, no Croslandite intellectual bequest to future Labour generations. There is no defining transformation of the Labour party, as Neil Kinnock achieved or even a landmark speech, such as Hugh Gaitskell’s with a resonant phrase such as “fight, fight and fight again for the party we love,” to rally the moderate spirit through the years.

Ed Balls went to a good public school, to Oxford, over to Harvard for a stint teaching, returning to write leaders for the FT, on to working for Gordon Brown in opposition and government, to MP and into the cabinet two years after entering parliament. Sometimes life can be so simple.

Like many of that generation of New Labour SpAds who glided into the Commons, the reality is that his primary value was as a backroom adviser. When he, and the rest such as David Miliband, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband went front of house, the ceiling caved in.

To slightly misquote Joe Pesci in Casino, “In the end, they fucked it all up. It should have been so sweet, too.”

The road that began with that generation’s entry into the Commons in the early to mid-2000s will finally end on June 8th this year with the immolation of a Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn, walking wilfully onto the electoral pyre.

Ed Balls elevation to Labour superstar status on the basis of such a thin record says it all about the absent alternative that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to his huge leadership victories.

Moderates need to do better if the party is to be resurrected after the coming election defeat. Part of that involves finding more worthy heroes than Ed Balls.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

Tags: Atul Hatwal, Ed Balls, Ed Balls day, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Pesci, New Labour