So. In addition to Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor, being a bit of an idiot, he was also the second choice of shadow chancellor, behind David Miliband. Ed Mliband so desperately didn't want Balls as his chancellor.

Plus:

In addition to being a deficit denier, Balls seems to be a debt denier as will -he's also refusing to pay off his own debts to the landlord of his former constituency office which he left in a poor state.

As any student will tell him, when you rent a place to live you make an agreement to leave it in the state you found it, and, if you don't, then the Landlord can withhold your deposit and also if necessary claim for more if you're particularly poor tenants.

For example, removing the burglar alarm that the Landlord says is his, and saying that it's actually yours, might not be a good move.

It seems that all this boils down to is £1,966 in allegedly owed rent and the cost of making Balls' former constituency office good once more. Ironically, Balls has put out a statement saying "The bottom line is that there will be no payment of taxpayers’ money that is not justified".


How exactly is this a taxpayer money issue??!!??







Then again this is Ed Balls we're talking about, and he doesn't exactly have form for spending his money does he?

I'd so give him one.

Matt Hancock MP, has written to Ed Balls demanding that he doesn’t use taxpayers’ money to extricate himself from his personal financial mess which has seen him end up in Court over unpaid debts related to damage done to his former constituency office premises.




Best comic line in the letter:

As the country knows only too well, this is not the first time you have vacated an office leaving behind you a shockingly poor state of repair.

Why is this man still an MP, still shadow chancellor?!

The people that voted for him must have done so out of blind loyalty, rather than any other rational reason.

Efforts are being made in certain quarters to dismiss the Balls Files disclosures as ancient history and thus unimportant.

But the revelations certainly do still matter for a number of reasons, not least the ultimate insight they provide into the bitter, counter-productive feuds at the heart of the New Labour administration. And Balls' poisoned part in it. For those who supported the party more than once at the polling booth and elsewhere that matters a great deal.

Who will rid us of this troublesome person


edit: Polly Toynbee (of the Gruniard) has just referred to Ed Balls as "Labour's most effective frontbencher" Says it all really!

Latest:

Judge orders Balls to pay debts of £1,095 plus expenses.

Balls used an expensive London firm of solicitors so who knows how high it could be, perhaps thousands. Legal source says “he could so easily have settled at lower cost if he wasn’t so belligerent”.

I can't stand Ed Balls. He's reason enough to never vote for Labour.

We have the same problem in this country.

What it comes down to is that democracy is basically an exercise where the blind and misinformed elect the corrupt and incompetent to represent them in government.

I think a lot of people treat politics like football/soccer (or whichever team sport you may choose). In the same way people are tribal about which sports team they support (through better or worse), they are slavish to the same party; even if their team or party changes radically from how it was, from when they first started supporting that team-- and the team's players are complete donkeys.

It's amazing to note how many voters here think that Labour, Tories and Liberals still stand for the same things/ethos, that those parties did twenty or thirty years ago (they've since become populated by homogeneous careerist and PC politicians with no experience of the real word)-- and yet these same voters still are surprised when they get shafted by their tribe of choice. I imagine the same phenomenon can be observed with the Reps and Dems in the USA, do you think Parsy? I believe it's blind loyalty, that those voters cannot be detached from, by any rational reasoning [shrug]

If Abraham Lincoln (the first Republican president) could see what has become of the Republican Party today he would turn over in his grave.

In fairness those running against him must have been pretty awful.

The Shadow Chancellor question is more pressing though. Balls is becoming an increasingly big issue for Miliband and sooner rather than latter it’s going to start looking utterly absurd if he doesn’t get rid of him. However given that Johnson had to go at the start of the year you do wonder if Labour can have another new Shadow Chancellor this soon…

Although if you were to see Ed Balls' Special Advisor (Alex Belardinelli) tweets and press release, you might be led to believe that Ed Balls actually WON the case!!



Spinning is alive and well in the Ed Balls camp!!

As Guido said, follow the costs.

Follow the money:

Quote from Deep Throat, insider who told Bob Woodward about Watergate....

Some of the best advice in politics if you want to know what's really going on.

money makes the earth goes ,and money maybe make it stop someday!

Or as Confuscius once said: "Man who put penis in till, come into money"

Not if I slam the till drawer shut, you won't....

The only option after that would be coxless rowing

Depends how hard you slam it. Confuscius say: "Learn to masturbate kinky, it come in handy"