Ed Balls has criticised the “anti-business” stance adopted by the former Labour leader Ed Miliband in the election campaign, in his first interview since losing his House of Commons seat.
The former shadow chancellor said there had been policy disagreements with Miliband, who did not include Balls in his core campaign team.
Balls told the Telegraph: “It was no secret that I thought from the very beginning that Ed needed to position himself better with business … I said to him very early on that we should come out for the new runway at Heathrow because it would be a very good signal of long-termism. I’d rather Labour had made that move three years earlier. Ed didn’t want that.”
He also opposed the Labour leader’s plan to freeze energy prices: “What I didn’t like was the language giving the impression that energy companies are the bad guys. If you allow yourself to be anti-business, or anti-bank or anti-energy company, people think: ‘Hang on a second, you have to work with these people if you want to govern.’”
Balls said he shouldered some of the responsibility for Labour’s emphatic defeat at the polls in May. “People didn’t want Ed as prime minister, and they didn’t want a Labour government. That includes me. I’m not going to start making excuses or shifting responsibility.”
The former MP for Morley and Outwood said that the chancellor, George Osborne, was one of the first to get in touch after his surprise defeat. “He sent me a very nice text,” Balls said of his former Commons adversary.
Other high-profile figures including the former prime minister Tony Blair and the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, also sent their condolences.
Balls admits in the interview that he found adjusting to life outside politics difficult. “It was such a big change ... Other than going to the play-off matches to see Norwich [City FC] promoted, I didn’t do much for the first two weeks.”
The politician also revealed that he turned down an invitation to appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here. “I wrote back to say that I’d already subjected myself to one high-profile public vote this year, and I wasn’t really sure that I wanted a second one. At least having to eat bugs and crickets wasn’t part of the election process. I’m not tough enough for that.”
Balls will take up a part-time role at Harvard University researching financial stability and another part-time position at the London School of Economics.
His wife, Yvette Cooper, is one of the four candidates vying to become leader of the Labour party.
