‘There are Le Creusets and frying pans and bowls and sieves…’ Ed Balls in the kitchen. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer Ed Balls ‘I could have had a midlife crisis’: Ed Balls on cooking and life after politics He’s been shadow chancellor, and he wowed the crowds on Strictly. Now Ed Balls has written a book that’s part memoir, part cookbook. He talks about kitchen confidence, failing at diets – and why politics is still a hot subject for him

In the wake of the show came the idea for a book that would expand on a collection of family recipes he collated for Ellie when she went away to university. The result is Appetite, an entertaining memoir told through food, complete with recipes for key dishes in his life. His grandma’s shepherd’s pie. A roast like the one his mother would have on the table at the family home in Norwich every Sunday in the 1970s. The all-night slow-cooked pork he served at constituency parties, and for which he was shopping on 28 April 2011, when he accidentally tweeted his own name from Castleford Asda. Rather than be embarrassed by tweeting his own name, he leant into Ed Balls Day. The British political food book is not a crowded field, aside from Nigel Lawson’s diet guide, but it’s fertile ground. Balls knows his onions.

By now we shouldn’t be surprised by Ed Balls’s extracurricular enthusiasms. In Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, people tend to be either hedgehogs, who know a lot about one thing, or foxes, who know a little about many things. For most of his life, Balls gave every impression of being a classic hedgehog, a gifted economist who read PPE at Oxford before a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard and a brief career as a leader writer for the FT. At 27 he took a job working on fiscal policy for Gordon Brown with another bright young Labour wonk, Ed Miliband. It wasn’t long before Balls was fast-tracked into becoming an MP, one of the heirs apparent to the Blair/Brown generation, and quickly elevated to the cabinet as secretary of state for children, schools and families. After Labour lost in 2010, Balls came third in the ensuing leadership contest behind the brothers Miliband, and emerged as the obvious choice to become shadow chancellor. He approached the 2015 general election reasonably confident he would be the next chancellor of the exchequer.

In such situations politicians usually slink off, write a cathartic memoir – not always in a shepherd’s hut – and brood on what might have been. Instead, Balls threw himself into other activities with the zest he once brought to keeping Britain out of the euro. The hedgehog became distinctly foxlike. On Strictly Come Dancing, in fake tan and sequins, Balls showed BBC viewers a fun-loving, game side that hadn’t always been obvious during his political career. When he got round to the cathartic book, Speaking Out, it was more readable than the usual political doorstops, a series of life lessons presented in digestible chapters. He climbed Kilimanjaro with Shirley Ballas and Dani Dyer for Comic Relief. He played the banjo at the Royal Variety Show. “The big question about Ed Balls,” one political journalist tells me, “is how do you have that life nonstop up to the age of 48 and not end up a total psychopath? He had all these dry and busy jobs, but is also a very normal well-rounded person.”

As he digs into the fish he enumerates his other interests. A diehard Norwich City fan – and club chairman for three years until 2018 – Balls was a regular in the MPs v hacks fixture. He still plays once a week at Shoreditch Powerleague, with fellow ex-MP James Purnell and other old Labour lags. Then there’s the piano. “I’ve just agreed to play in a concert in December – a charity concert in Kings Place – I’m going to play the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations. I’m starting to regret it… I originally foolishly said in an interview when I was shadow chancellor that my goal was Grade 8 by 50, which sailed past. It’s like the government’s fiscal rules. You say, ‘Over the next three years, I will’ and then every year it’s still within sight.” Oh, and don’t forget the sailing and golf.

“I’ve come to terms with not having to succeed,” he adds. “I don’t mind if I’m not good. I quite like being OK at stuff. I spent years in a world where there was this drive and competition to get to the top and to feel the pressure of that. And the truth is I don’t feel any pressure now. Part of me wishes I’d got to that stage earlier. I wish I’d spent more of my 30s and 40s with a bit more of that other stuff in the mix. I don’t think doing more hours makes for better government. If I was running a team of surgeons, I’d want to know they had time off.”

One of his regrets is not spending more time with his children when they were young. He and Yvette were the first married couple to serve in the cabinet at the same time. “We tried hard,” he says. “But we could have done better.” Has cooking been a way to make up for lost time? “Definitely. I would always do the weekend cooking when they were little, but it’s not just the cooking. It’s asking them what they want, cooking the things they ask for, to be able to be the person who delivers. I didn’t miss out entirely, but I wish I had done more. But you might as well find that out now rather than on your deathbed, because it leaves you time to do something about it.”

Balls was taught to cook by his mother, and later in life it was through her meals that the family got the first inklings of her dementia, as the ever-reliable cook began serving uncooked food. “I didn’t think I was going to write about the dementia,” he says. “I was going to write about what my mum taught me and where my love of cooking began. But food was the first time we knew mum’s dementia was bad. I said this to my dad, and he said, ‘For me, that happened all the time. It became normal. For you to see your mum, who had always cooked Sunday lunch, produce something raw, was a jarring moment.” His dad slowly took over in the kitchen, which offended his increasingly disoriented mum. During the pandemic, with his mother in full-time care, his dad started to experiment with dishes he would never have tried before.

Later, Balls was present for the infamous dinner on Upper Street in Islington, at the now defunct restaurant Granita, where Blair and Brown are said to have agreed how they would divide up the leadership of the Labour party. Disoriented by a menu that featured polenta, Brown didn’t eat, instead wolfing down a steak back at HQ. “Gordon would have his steaks basically incinerated,” Balls says. “Of course I tried to have a word with him about that, but as my dad would say, ‘There are different people and they like their beef cooked in different ways.’” Would Brown mind that the other recent world leader who preferred his steaks well done was Donald Trump? “Gordon would not be happy about that,” Balls says.

For all Balls talks of his newfound freedom, the politician has not completely vanished. He can’t resist a pop at the Tories over the school meals fiasco. “They were so tin-eared,” he says. “What were they doing? If they had been on the ball, Marcus Rashford would not have had the same cut-through.” He won’t say whether he thinks Keir Starmer is the right man to lead the Labour party, only that he has his work cut out. “Keir’s working very hard at it, but the scale of the task is huge,” he says. “It’s much harder than the last time either party had to rebuild like this. He’s dealing with the hard-left infiltration and the antisemitism, the disconnect that happened after the Brexit referendum. He knows that Labour can’t win as an urban party and has never been able to do that.”

It’s also true that the pandemic has provided utter vindication to a Ballsian view of stimulus spending. After the financial crash, Balls as shadow chancellor made the case for government spending to support an economy in crisis. At the time George Osborne was able to persuade voters that austerity was a better course. Coronavirus, which put voters’ lives directly on the line, has put paid to that debate. “Austerity feels like a very, very long time ago,” Balls says. “Our arguments in 2009-10 were that you have to support the economy and job creation. If you try to go too early to consolidate with austerity and cutting the state, you’ll make things worse. These are the arguments the Treasury, the Bank of England and the chancellor have made for the past 18 months. They’re right. They were right 10 years ago, as well. It’s taken a pandemic for people to be forced to see the wisdom of those ideas.”

Source: The Guardian

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