Ed Balls on social media storms, speech impediments and fighting to gi
Ed Balls knows all too well how nimble thumbs create social media storms. It’s been almost 12 years since the former shadow chancellor, then a Twitter rookie, accidentally posted a social media message with just his name in it – culminating in thousands of mocking retweets and an annual day affectionately named in his honour. But the former Labour minister’s gaffe was tame compared with the WhatsApp furore that has engulfed Matt Hancock.
Since journalist Isabel Oakeshott leaked 100,000 messages detailing his time as health secretary during the pandemic, revelations drip-fed to the public have proved embarrassing for everyone involved.
“I’m from a pre-WhatsApp era,” says Ed, 56, an ex-education secretary who left politics in 2015. “We always, in our minds, thought it was really important when you wrote things down that you would be happy for them to be seen in the public domain. And if you weren’t happy, you shouldn’t be writing things down!”
The cache of messages were shared with Ms Oakeshott when she helped ghostwrite Hancock’s pandemic memoirs. “Giving those messages, including messages from other people, to Isabel Oakeshott is one of the most epic pieces of misjudgement I have ever seen in my life,” Ed tells the Daily Express.
“I’m afraid they feel preening and self-regarding and not serious at a time when the whole country was worried about what was going on and looking for the Government to take a lead.”
Discussing the art of good communication – or lack thereof – seems particularly apt as we’re talking today about Ed’s supporting role in a charity video for Action for Stammering Children.
Now a broadcaster, the former politician became a vice-president for the charity in 2016, seven years after revealing he himself had a stammer.
The film is up for a gong at the sixth Charity Film Awards, the “Oscars of the charity world”, according to Ed, which asks the public to vote for their favourite cause-based films.
The finalists will be revealed during a ceremony at Leicester Square’s Odeon cinema, London, later this month. Actors Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor and film director Steve McQueen have all participated and comic Tom Allen will host.
Ed acts with comedian Ed MacArthur in a film called Me & My Stammer, also featuring Elliott Hall, ten, who is learning to live with his own speech impediment.
The film’s central message is about acceptance and understanding, and the need to see a stammer as a friend, not an enemy. Indeed, Ed wishes he could have seen it that way when he was ten years old.
“Stammering is not something you catch and generally it’s not something you get cured of,” he explains. “It’s just part of who you are. If you don’t talk about it and try to hide it – or are embarrassed, shamed or annoyed by it – then it becomes a burden and can make your stammer worse.”
Watching the film, viewers gain insight into what’s going on inside a stammerer’s head when they struggle to speak.
“There are many children and young people with stammers who will often feel that nobody else gets what it’s like, yet it’s really important for all of us to understand,” Ed continues.
“And you will understand better when you hear it directly from a young person who knows what they’re talking about.”
Acting is yet another skill in Ed’s ever-burgeoning repertoire.
Already an economist, politician, writer and professor, he gyrated to Gangnam Style on Strictly Come Dancing in 2016 and won Celebrity Best Home Cook.
“It’s great to be a film star,” he quips today. “Although if there was an award for the individual actors, I and Ed MacArthur would be both in line for Best Supporting Actor as Elliott is the star.”
His ability to deliver a joke is important because getting your words out under pressure can be difficult when you stammer.
He learned this to his detriment after he became Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in 2007.
At that time, remarkably, he still didn’t know he stammered.
“I just knew sometimes I didn’t get my words out, and that had been true when I was a teenager,” he says.
“It tended to happen in stressful situations and under pressure – and then it happened on television and in Parliament.”
Searching for answers, he discovered he had an “interiorised” stammer that caused pauses known as “word blocks”.
“It wasn’t what I thought was a stammer where you s-s-s-stutter because you c-c-c-can’t get your words out,” he explains.
He underwent speech therapy but spent two further years “concealing” his knowledge, believing it wiser to keep it quiet. It was only at an event at the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering in October 2009 that he decided to go public.
Children with stammers had made a video asking teachers not to interrupt or hurry them up. “I saw children having that confidence and I suddenly realised I was being a coward,” he says.
Ed had been bullied at school for his speech impediment and his unease at going public is understandable considering the House of Commons can often seem like a brutal playground where insults are traded like slingshots.
Opposition MPs, journalists and sketch writers regularly taunted him and said he lacked confidence or was wooden in his delivery. He recalls one occasion as shadow chancellor when he was humiliated by a backbench MP. “He yelled at me, ‘Get your words out!’” Ed recalls.
“The Speaker jumped up and said it was unacceptable in a way that wouldn’t have happened normally. I had a letter a couple of days later [from the MP] to say they were very regretful for what they had said.
They hadn’t understood before and they did now. Once people understand, things change.” Ed won’t name the politician but the experience has evidently stuck in his mind.
He has no regrets about having a stammer, as he believes it has made him more resilient. But he’s glad children like Elliott won’t have to wait until they are over 40 years old, like he did, for positive affirmation.
He now admits if he’d been aware at a younger age he had a stammer, he might not have chosen politics as a career.
“If I had known when I was at the Treasury, as an adviser, that I had a stammer, might it have made me think: Is it wise to go into a career that is all about public speaking? It might have done.
“The reality was I only found out I had a stammer after I’d been elected. But if I had allowed it to get in the way, it would have been a total mistake. I’ve always been someone who thought these things were there to be overcome.
‘I don’t think I realised that being public was the way to do it. I hope it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I would have liked to have understood it and worked out how to deal with it ten years earlier.”
Reading an autocue and interviewing guests is something he once would have thought impossible. But this is all part of his job now as a regular presenter of ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
He says he loves his new gig, especially working alongside Susanna Reid and the team.
“We have the privilege for three hours every day to talk about the most important issues facing the country, but also wider stuff, which is fun and cultural.”
But he jokes that he has watched more Love Island than he ever expected to as a consequence of appearing on the programme.
He hasn’t entirely left politics behind either. There are weekly spars with his old adversary, former chancellor George Osborne, on The Andrew Neil Show on Channel 4. And he can certainly still deliver a politician’s answer.
Asked if he foresees a return to Westminster, as some political insiders predict, he replies: “You should always move forward rather than go back.”
But what if Labour wins the next election and Keir Starmer offers him a Cabinet position?
“One should always stay in the real world rather than engage in the world of fairy tales,” he says. “This is not [Enid Blyton’s] The Faraway Tree and the political return land is not above the tree today.”
So he’s staying in the world of show business… for now at least. Ed manages to manoeuvre highbrow and lowbrow culture seamlessly because he combines a heavyweight intellect with everyman charm.
His career reads textbook academic: a philosophy, politics and economics degree at Oxford University followed by a scholarship to Harvard University.
Then a brief stint as a leader writer on a broadsheet newspaper before a job as fiscal policy adviser to Labour and an MP in 2005. When he lost his seat in 2015, he changed tack. Strictly Come Dancing endeared him to a wider audience and provided a springboard for further TV.
In 2018, he made a documentary, Travels in Trumpland, hilariously wrestling with the former American president’s supporters clad in a Union Jack red lycra suit. And then two years ago he explored the social care home crisis by working in a care home.
Ed’s career transformation brings to mind Michael Portillo, another politician who lost his Parliamentary seat in dramatic fashion yet reinvented himself as a travel writer and broadcaster.
True, Ed did not have to claw himself back from political humiliation in quite the same manner but their new careers as popular light entertainment broadcasters are not entirely dissimilar.
“I don’t think I could manage the trousers quite like Michael Portillo has done,” Ed jokes, referencing the bold shades favoured by his TV counterpart.
Married to shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, 53, for 25 years, with whom he has three children, Ed is enjoying living in the present, be it his many charitable activities or hosting Good Morning Britain with Susanna Reid.
He still stammers, but it bothers him much less now. And just knowing he can talk about it openly has been a “huge reliever of stress and pressure”.
If anything, he just wishes he could have learned that lesson and confronted it years ago. It’s why he’s so passionate about Me & My stammer being shared with a wide audience.
He smiles: “I’m now at the point which Elliot’s got to, which is that I own it. It’s part of who I am and I’m not covering up.”
- The Charity Film Awards, promoting cause-based films, are recognised by the BFI and IMDB. View the 2023 shortlist at smileycharityfilmawards.com/finalists
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