The last time Ed Balls faced the voters, he didn’t have to do it in skintight jeans, button-straining red check shirt and – as one of the Strictly Come Dancing judges most unkindly suggested – “flapping around like a mating rooster”.
On the other hand, in May 2015 the former shadow chancellor lost his seat by 422 votes; this weekend he won a standing ovation from the audience, an admiring tweet from George Osborne – and his turbo-charged charleston helped the BBC show thrash ITV’s The X Factor by 9.2 million viewers to 8.1 million as the two went head to head for the first time in the series.
After Balls’ storming performance, to the tune of the 1955 hit The Banjo’s Back in Town, his wife, Yvette Cooper, breathed a heartfelt “wow!” to the camera, while several of the judges and many of the viewers wiped away tears of laughter.
Among those watching on TV was the man Balls had confronted many times across the floor of the House of Commons. “Come on @edballs!” Osborne tweeted.
“What a comeback,” judge Bruno Tonioli said, “Tony Blair would be proud.”
The routine left Balls out of breath but with all his political marbles intact. When senior judge Len Goodman snarked “You’ve gone to the country before and didn’t do very well”, Balls snapped back: “We did win three elections.”
The Labour MP Liz Kendall also tweeted her support:
Go go go @edballs !! Fab performance, gave it loads of welly, love the jazz hands too! #glitterballs #scd #craigiswrong https://t.co/1sJBN415WN
— Liz Kendall (@leicesterliz) October 1, 2016
The actor Tony Robinson, a longtime Labour party supporter, tweeted: “He played his partner’s leg like it was a banjo. The crowd went wild. That’s socialism!!”. After Balls lost his seat, his wife described speculation that he might take on Strictly as “a terrifying thought”, and Balls himself said he wasn’t sure he was “equipped” for it. His stiff and visibly terrified waltz in the first week put him bottom of the leaderboard and he said he was disappointed with it himself.
He told his children he feared he looked more like a rugby player than a dancer – “a camp rugby player”, they told him supportively.
On his sofa-television rounds since then – Balls also has a political memoir, Speaking Out, to plug – he encountered Vince Cable, twinkle-toed former deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, who put in a notably smooth performance in a Christmas special of the show.
Cable told him he either had to reconcile himself to being the no-hoper joke contestant – like the former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe or the political commentator John Sergeant – or he had to really go for it.
He went for it. “That’s a sight I don’t think I ever want to see again,” judge Craig Horwood sighed, before marking him 3/10.
The combined votes of the judges over the two weeks before the first public vote came in left him still bottom of the leaderboard.
However, at least one viewer felt it was time for Balls to take on another contest entirely. Ian Masterson tweeted: “Call a Labour leadership election now! Corbyn vs BALLS! Only one winner.”
