Fatboy Spin

Please, please, please let Ed Balls win.  It will annoy us all intently that such an odious twerp will be front and centre of British politics for five years, but I'm confident that he's the only candidate - and I mean the only one, including Burnham and Abbott - who will certainly cause Labour to win fewer seats than they currently have at the next election.  It's a classic case of someone popular in the Party but who the public find nauseating (like Michael Foot, only chubbier, less eloquent and entirely unprincipled).  His latest slimy backtracking from the manifesto he fought under is deeply revealing - freed from the burdens of office he feels liberated to promise no cuts of any kind - at a stroke prompting all kinds of disdainful Paxmanesque questioning.  How would you explain this to the people of Britain, then, as their Prime Minister, when the bond markets caused havoc as our debt rocketed past £1.5 trillion - that's trillion with a 't' - and we had to be bailed out by the IMF again, this time with 50% cuts in your precious public spending?  The official verdict would surely be "not ready for primetime".