Ed Balls is worried about Christmas. It just isn’t the way it was when he was a lad. He talks excitedly about the festive season in the Balls household three decades ago, heralded each year by the arrival of his grandmother, bearing a special treat. “You remember the big issue of the Radio Times, when it was the only source of TV listings? You only had four channels. What you chose was really exciting.”
As one of the “Young Turks” around Gordon Brown, Balls is often represented as some sort of teenage tearaway, when he is in fact a 40-year-old father-of-three. He grew up in the 1970s, in the days before satellite television, before mobile phones, before the internet.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Content from our partners
