Ed Balls’s life changed in an instant with his shock election defeat in the early hours of Friday 9 May, 2015. Quite how massive that change would be no one could have guessed.
When the country went to the polls he was tipped as the next Chancellor of the Exchequer if Labour won, and a possible future Prime Minister. But after losing his seat by just 422 votes, he was forced to rethink his whole life.
Since then Ed has reinvented himself as a TV personality willing to have a go at any challenge – winning the hearts of the nation as he danced to Gangnam Style on Strictly with pro partner Katya Jones.
An avid foodie, he shone on The Great Sport Relief Bake Off before winning BBC1’s Celebrity Best Home Cook earlier this year. The experience inspired him to write a memoir like no other, packed with revelations about New Labour’s most powerful figures and the meals he shared with them…
Ed Balls (pictured) shares revelations about powerful figures he met during his political career in an extract from his new book
THE GRANITA SUMMIT
When Tony Blair suggested, in 1994, that he and my boss Gordon Brown meet at the Granita restaurant near Tony’s home in Islington, after the death of Labour leader John Smith, the food was the last thing on either mind.
A good thing in Gordon’s case, since I could tell from the moment we walked in that it was not his type of place. The menu was short and Mediterranean. ‘What exactly is polenta?’ he asked me gruffly.
I made my excuses after their starters arrived and left the two of them alone, but the fact that Gordon did much more talking than eating during that fateful dinner was evidenced by the way he wolfed down a steak and chips immediately afterwards, back in Westminster, while giving me and others his version of the conversation.
It’s hard to imagine such a dinner happening these days – the two leading candidates to be the next Leader of the Opposition, most likely the next PM, sitting together in a restaurant on Upper Street working out the future.
Today a picture would be on Twitter or Instagram within minutes. Back then it was a newspaper diarist, sitting two tables down, who got the scoop. Nothing in politics ever stays private.
Ed said food was the last thing on his mind when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (pictured) arranged to meet at the Granita restaurant after the death of Labour leader John Smith
THE DAY I TOOK 12 FOR THE TEAM
Ed said he was judged to be an ideal holiday companion for Gordon Brown (pictured) because he could drive, play tennis and discuss politics
Gordon Brown, who I worked under for 13 years in the Labour party and at the Treasury, was a creature of habit with food. He didn’t need to choose his meals if I arrived at a restaurant first; I knew what he’d want.
French restaurant: a well-done steak and chips. Chinese: lemon chicken. Indian: lamb bhuna with a Peshwari naan. Italian: spaghetti bolognaise. And Japanese… come on, can you imagine Gordon Brown eating raw fish?
I did once get the ordering badly wrong. One of my first duties, before his wife-to-be Sarah had properly entered Gordon’s life, was to help make him have a holiday for a few days, often in the South of France or the Algarve. The only way to do that was for someone to go with him so he still had someone to talk to about work.
I could drive, play tennis and discuss politics and economics, so I was judged to be an ideal holiday companion. On one occasion we travelled down to the French coast for an evening meal and I plumped for the set menu for two, featuring entrecote steak frites. I didn’t pay much attention to the starter, since I wasn’t sure what ‘huitres’ were.
Ten minutes later, the waiter plonked a huge metal contraption on our table decked with a dozen big, raw oysters, fresh from the sea. Gordon looked at me in horror – he’d never eaten an oyster in his life and wasn’t about to now.
I managed to wolf down half of them and was starting to feel queasy, but the maître d’ refused to take them away. Each time he glided by and saw uneaten oysters, he just said something incomprehensible and disapproving, shrugged and walked away.
It became clear we weren’t going to get our steaks until all the oysters were gone. Soon Gordon, too, was looking daggers at me, urging me to get on with it. I slurped on.
Once we got into government in 1997, Gordon’s simple tastes proved a challenge – not in the Treasury itself, where he would happily make do every day with the stodgy canteen lunches or his fridge-load of mince-based ready meals, but due to the sheer volume of official lunches and dinners he’d have to attend, especially at foreign summits: a nightmare of tiddly starters, haute cuisine main courses and fancy desserts.
Fortunately, a good thing about having an intense personality like Gordon’s is that he could happily spend half an hour ignoring his Fugu sashimi or Matsutake mushrooms at the G7 dinner in Tokyo, while talking vigorously to his neighbour from Canada about the need for reform of the World Bank.
When the offending dish was taken away untouched, it would just be written off as more evidence of how driven Gordon was by his work, not as some flagrant rejection of Japanese hospitality likely to cause a major diplomatic rift.
THE LASAGNE PLOT… OR NOT
Ed and Yvette cooked a lasagne (pictured) after inviting their teams round to their house for New Year morale boosting
Yvette and I were the first married couple in British history to be in Cabinet together. That’s a nice fact to tell the grandchildren one day, and hopefully by then we’ll have forgotten how tiring, hectic and stressful it was.
We were struggling to look after three children under eight years old, all travelling 400 miles every weekend to and from our Yorkshire home, as well as dealing with the media.
Focus groups showed people thought it weird we were both politicians – ‘Do they only talk about politics at home?’, ‘Will they make their kids be politicians too?’
After Labour lost the election in 2010 and Ed Miliband took over, there were murmurings against his leadership. Yvette and I worked in our respective shadow Home Office and shadow Treasury briefs, and in 2012 we invited our teams round to our house with their partners for a spot of New Year morale boosting.
I cooked the inevitable lasagne, just as my mum would have done, and it was a great evening, but we’d forgotten the cardinal rule: if MPs meet outside of Westminster, then they must be plotting.
Sure enough, three days later a headline proclaimed: ‘Ed and Yvette’s Lasagne Plot’. We were accused of planning to unseat Ed Miliband, with the guilty parties named and shamed.
Of course, the fact that nothing happened after wasn’t taken as proof that nothing was ever going to happen, but that we’d been thwarted.
A POWER LUNCH WITH PETER
Ed said Peter Mandelson used lunch to size him up, make a strong impression and tell him what his future should look like. Pictured: Ed and Peter in 2009
‘You must come round to my little flat on Saturday,’ Peter Mandelson smiled. ‘We’ll have some lunch and talk about your future.’
As a 26-year-old Financial Times journalist, here I was, the year after Labour’s shock 1992 election defeat, being summoned by one of its most influential and controversial figures.
Peter’s goal at this one-on-one meeting was to persuade me to come to work for Gordon Brown and Labour. It was the most exciting lunch invitation I’d ever received.
We ate in the kitchen of his Wilmington Square flat in central London. Everything was pristine – the neat kitchen, beautiful plates, crisp napkins – and the lunch was simple and exquisite: tomato soup, crusty French bread, and a little green salad with baby tomatoes and a lightly tossed vinaigrette.
As someone of my appetite would, I ate it all, assuming it was the starter, but – perfect as it was – that was the full lunch.
If I was hosting someone, I’d have wanted to leave them turning down a third helping of dessert, but as the years have passed I realised that was the point.
Lunch was on his terms and Peter used it to size me up, make a strong impression and tell me what my future should look like. That’s what they call establishing a power dynamic.
MARTINI, RED WINE AND CIGARETTES
Ed recounts a pink-coated waiter (pictured) bringing round a box of untipped cigarettes during the monthly lunch with Bank of England governor Eddie George
The monthly lunch with Bank of England governor Eddie George was a major political and economic event. Before the Bank was given political independence, these informal meetings between Treasury officials and the governor in theory decided together whether interest rates should go up, down, or stay the same.
Perhaps because he knew these lunches would soon be a thing of the past, Eddie made the most of our first one. He preceded it by downing a martini, and then drank the lion’s share of a bottle of claret from the Bank cellar with his roast beef.
A pink-coated waiter brought round a box of untipped cigarettes and another bottle of red wine to go with our coffees. Gordon’s principal private secretary, Nick Macpherson, and I accepted both, sacrificing our health and sobriety for the good of Treasury-Bank relations, and Eddie visibly relaxed.
Gordon was happy enough with the food, but clearly found the rest unacceptably decadent.
YVETTE’S VACCINE CONTROVERSY
Yvette and Ed decided to tell people their children had had the MMR vaccine, after claims about its link to autism spread. Pictured: Yvette and Ed, with their daughter Ellie
Yvette was the public health minister when the MMR crisis broke out. After pseudo-scientist Andrew Wakefield’s unfounded claims that there was a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, many parents chose not to let their children have the vaccine. As a result, measles has re-emerged.
Yvette and I decided she should tell people our children had had the vaccine. As the minister responsible, she couldn’t stand with the chief medical officer and tell parents it was safe for their children if we weren’t willing to say we had done it ourselves.
It was the right thing to do but it was controversial – because Tony Blair, as PM, was unwilling to say whether his young son had received the jab. I don’t think his office forgave her for that.
But as we’ve seen with the Covid vaccine it’s vital to counter these scare stories, and impossible to do that if you can’t say whether you’ve followed the advice you’re giving to others.
IN THE POLITICAL WILDERNESS
Ed and Yvette had already booked a holiday in the USA, when he lost his seat in 2015 (pictured)
When I lost my seat in 2015 we’d already booked a holiday in the USA, with a week in a 32ft camper van – an ‘RV’, as Americans call them – between LA and San Francisco.
Appetite: A Memoir In Recipes Of Family And Food, by Ed Balls, is published by Gallery Books on 19 August. Adapted here by Christopher Stevens
Before we got the van, we had a few days by Lake Powell in the Rocky Mountains. But once Yvette became a candidate for leadership after Ed Miliband’s departure, we had a problem.
She was torn between the family and her campaign, and Jeremy Corbyn was surging ahead. No sooner were we out on the lake than her team were sending urgent messages wanting her to return.
We were eight hours behind the UK and the only place we could get a phone signal was in the middle of the lake. We decided Yvette would fly home early, but until then each morning at 4am – noon in Britain – Yvette and I would get in the motorboat to chug out into the lake.
I sat reading for an hour with the sun rising while Yvette talked with her team. I’ve thought about those mornings a lot over the years when people ask if I miss being in politics and if I’d go back. I’m not saying wild horses couldn’t drag me, but it might take a pretty big RV.
Appetite: A Memoir In Recipes Of Family And Food, by Ed Balls, is published by Gallery Books on 19 August. Adapted here by Christopher Stevens