Miliband ‘too weak to sack Balls’

The Conservative Party chairman said Mr Miliband’s adviser’s disparaging description of the shadow chancellor’s economic message showed Labour could not be trusted with the economy.

Mr Shapps claimed the emails, in which one of the Labour leader’s advisers describes Mr Balls’s response to optimistic economic growth forecasts as a “nightmare”, showed Labour had not moved on from the in-fighting seen in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years.

He said: “With Labour’s two most senior figures at each other’s throats, they cannot be trusted to run the economy.

“Miliband never wanted Balls in the post, but if he’s too weak to sack his ‘nightmare’ shadow chancellor, then he is too weak to cut the deficit, too weak to fix the welfare system and too weak to stand up for ordinary hard-working people. Once again we’re seeing in-fighting between a Labour leader and his shadow chancellor. It really is the same old Labour.”

In the emails, obtained by the Mail on Sunday, Mr Miliband’s adviser Torsten Bell describes 
Mr Balls’s response to this 
week’s optimistic growth, jobs and inflation forecasts from 
the Bank of England as a “nightmare”.

Mr Bell appeared to take issue with the briefing from the shadow chancellor’s camp which argued for a “recovery built to last” and focused on “cost of living” and an “economy that works for working people”.

The adviser forwarded it on to another member of Mr Miliband’s team “as an example of why we’re having problems on EB messaging”.

The two politicians are known 
to have fallen out before in the past.

The contention over whether there should be a third runway 
at Heathrow during Labour’s time in government saw the two 
take opposite ends of the argument.

When Mr Miliband was elected leader in 2010 after defeating a 
list of other candidates including Mr Balls and his own brother David, he conspicuously 
didn’t offer Mr Balls the job of shadow Chancellor, instead appointing Hull MP Alan Johnson to the role.

It was only after Mr Johnson resigned for personal reasons 
that Mr Balls was appointed to the job.

However since he assumed the shadow chancellor brief the pair have succeeded in keeping their differences under wraps with a far more collegial relationship between the pair having seemingly emerged.

However, frontbench colleagues jumped yesterday to dampen fears of another Brown/Blair-style fallout.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham insisted that the Labour Party and its front bench was more united than it has been in 20 years.

Asked if he saw Mr Balls as a “nightmare”, Mr Burnham told BBC One’s Sunday Politics show: “No, I don’t at all.

“He’s a very good friend and I can’t believe to be honest that you’re talking about those emails on a national political programme.

“My goodness, you’re obviously scraping the barrel today.

“I’ve been in frontline Labour politics for 20 years.

“I can’t remember the front bench, and indeed the wider party, being as united as it is today and that’s a great credit to Ed Miliband and to Ed Balls. We’re a united team, we’re going into a general election and we’re going to get rid of a pretty disastrous coalition government.”