Balls: Brown buckled to right-wing press
by Peter Wozniak
In a last-minute bid to rescue his campaign for the Labour leadership, Ed Balls has disowned the legacy of Gordon Brown.
In an interview with the Today programme, the candidate, seen as closest to Mr Brown prior to the election campaign, argued that the former prime minister was obsessed with pandering to the media and as a result the Labour party lost its coherence, and by implication, the election.
Mr Balls began with a thinly veiled attack on candidates who were quick to discard Mr Brown’s legacy, saying: “I could have chosen to break away in an emphatic and decisive way from Gordon in the last few years, and I didn’t.
“I disagreed strongly with Gordon on the 10p tax rate. I thought that we should have gone for the election in 2007. I felt he trimmed and fudged his message to try to keep the Daily Mail happy in a way that meant that people didn’t know where we stood.”
Mr Balls was also asked whether he was a ‘tribal’ politician unsuited to a ‘new politics’ of coalition building.
“I’m not tribal, but I will set out a different view, if that means working with the Liberal Democrats, so be it.”
The intervention comes as the Labour leadership race enters its final stages, with analysts firmly expecting the last name of the new leader to be Miliband, although it is still unclear whether David or Ed will edge into the lead.
Mr Balls has struggled to distinguish himself in the campaign, possibly due to his association with the deeply unpopular former prime minister. Recent polls saw him trail even backbencher Diane Abbott, previously thought of as the minnow in the election, but who is expected to perform well in the final ballot.
