By
Quentin Letts
16:39 EST, 5 July 2012
|
17:42 EST, 5 July 2012
Hand this to the Brownites, they know how to fight dirty.
Ed Balls, kicking, biting, eye-gouging for his political life, gave a speech of extraordinary violence in yesterday’s Commons debate on the Libor scandal.
How Mr Balls bawled. His speech was physically intimidating – his teeth bared, the eyes like those of an attacking pitbull – but dwelt little on the national interest.
Easy boys: Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, left, and Chancellor George Osborne, right, go for each other during the Commons debate on the Libor scandal
As Claire Perry (Con, Devizes) pointed out, banking employs a million people and pays some £85billion a year in taxes. Which is more important? That, or the career of Ed Balls?
Duh! Balls’s career, of course.
And so Labour had tooled itself up to the max. Its snarling bootboys radiated a sense of entitlement. We’re the boss class, it said. How dare anyone challenge us?
Simply as theatre, Mr Balls’s performance was hard to top. The man is a horror, yes. God knows what he does for Labour’s vote. But with that energy, that nerve, he’s a piece of work all right.
Labour opposed a swift parliamentary inquiry into banking (which could make life sweaty for Balls) and demanded a Leveson-style probe (which might bruise the Tories and would thrill Frankfurt and Paris).
Mr Balls was first to speak in the debate. He encountered raspberries from the Coalition benches, which no doubt had also been dragooned by party managers. The raspberries offended Mr Balls’s sensibilities.
It takes a special form of bombast for a man who every week yobbo-heckles David Cameron at PMQs to step back from the despatch box in Lady Bracknellesque shock when he himself is interrupted.
‘You got us in his mess!’ shouted Coalition MPs. Mr Balls gasped that the House should do things ‘in the proper way’.
This was as good as Sid James complaining about having his bottom pinched.
Mr Balls accused George Osborne of ‘partisanship’. Whaaaaaaaat? Is Ballsy himself not as tribal as an impi? And yet he moulded his mushed-up nose into a saucer of sorrow that a chancellor – any chancellor! – could be party political.
Of Gordon Brown (Lab, Kirkcaldy Cowdenbeath) there was nae sign. This innocent Balls, living saint, Mother Superior manque, fluted that his name had been ‘smeared’ by Mr Osborne. Boo hoo! De nasty man said wotten things about me! Mr Balls demanded an ‘apology’.
Occasionally he turned to the Chair to
invoke the gods of moderation and probity. The Coalition benches laughed
hard. Given that Labour MPs were already shouting support for their
man, this made the volume in the chamber impossible.
Pondering: Ed Miliband, sitting beside Mr Balls, looked rather glum at proceedings
The session was being chaired at this point by deputy speaker Nigel Evans. The crispness of Mr Evans’s call for order was impressive. He was sharp with Ian Austin (Lab, Dudley), a notorious knuckledragger from the Brown years.
But peace did not last long. The Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, intervened to make some devilishly clever thrust. Uh-oh. Mr Grieve was far too creaky to survive against the manic Balls. Wallop. Labour’s tricoteuses cackled.
Mr Grieve had another and another and
another go. Digging may work for archaeologists but it was not proving
an altogether wise strategy for the Attorney. Stretcher for Capt Grieve!
Mr
Osborne, come his moment, was met with a gale of Opposition argy-bargy.
I expected his voice to pink and his cheeks to blush. Not a bit of it.
He said, with just a little too much relish, that he had ‘never seen the
Labour party so rattled’.
At
this point the din reached massed vuvuzela levels. Deputy speaker Dawn
Primarolo told Andrew Gwynne (Lab, Denton Reddish) to belt up.
‘Members are angry but this debate is being watched by people who are a darn sight angrier,’ said cool Miss Primarolo.
Mr
Osborne said a judicial inquiry would take two years to complete and
that was too slow. ‘The Labour party wants to put off the moment that we
investigate.’ He added that ‘the Brownite cabal with all their tactics
have taken over the leadership of the Labour party’.
Ed Miliband, sitting beside Mr Balls, looked dead glum at that.
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