by Ed Balls
Once I got the Cabinet post, and was speaking regularly on TV or in Parliament, my occasional ‘blocks’ – unexpected pauses when I couldn’t get my words out – became a serious issue, so much so that the Conservative MPs opposite began to fill the painful moments of silence with loud jeers. I didn’t believe it at first when I was told I had an ‘interiorised stammer’, much like Colin Firth’s George VI in The King’s Speech. And when my excellent and caring speech therapist told me things wouldn’t improve until I went public with it, I just laughed. No way. Cabinet ministers can’t admit to a weakness. Politicians don’t do ‘vulnerable’.
Then it all came to a head. I had agreed to attend the launch of a special video for teachers made by Action for Stammering Children in which children with stammers, who had attended the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children, spoke openly and bravely about their stammer and urged teachers to give them the confidence and space to speak in their way.
Michael Palin and I both stood at the launch watching this incredible film, deeply moved. But afterwards, one of the children’s dads confronted me. ‘You’ve got a stammer,’ he told me, ‘and you don’t say or do anything about it. My son is so brave and I think you’re a coward.’ I winced inside, made my excuses and left. Back at my departmental desk, I burst into tears – also not normal Cabinet minister behaviour. I wrote a personal letter to every child in the video to thank them, telling them that I had a stammer too and that they were a great inspiration to me.
It was the turning point for me, the beginning of a new phase in my life. That weekend I did an interview for a national newspaper in which I spoke openly about it for the first time. My seventy-year-old dad rang me to tell me he had just read the interview and realised, for the first time, that the thing he had struggled with all his life was a stammer too.
That decision to go public was liberating. The stammer didn’t go away, but I knew how to manage it now and wasn’t trying to cover it up. I became Vice-President of Action for Stammering Children and persuaded Colin Firth to join me. Together we have talked to many parents and children over the years about stammering and what we have both learned. I know now how much my stammer is part of who I am, that dealing with it has given me the confidence to do many difficult and fabulous things since. For that reason, I always tell the parents Colin and I meet that of all the things I inherited from my dad, I’d keep the stammer. Not necessarily the surname, I hastily add. But definitely the stammer.
In a way I never expected, coming to terms with my stammer also helped me explain the purpose of my Cabinet job.
If kids are struggling with an issue no one knows about – whether it’s an undiagnosed condition like a stammer or having to look after a sick relative at home – it inevitably affects their learning and their behaviour in school, so, for the first time, my new department was trying to look at the lives of children in Britain in the round.
We could not have seen a better illustration of that theory than the debate prompted by footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaigning in 2020 over the provision of free meals for hungry children during the school holidays. What Marcus exposed was the absurd contradiction of a government accepting responsibility for whether children in the middle of an economic crisis are getting enough to eat when they are at school, but not when those schools are closed.
Back in the late 1990s, Yvette – as the new public health minister – introduced a plan to give every primary school child a free piece of fruit every morning to promote healthy eating. Forty years on from Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of free school milk, the story caught the imagination of the media, and in their follow-up reports, it was shocking to see so many children reporting that the fruit they received under Yvette’s plan was not just the only fresh fruit they were eating that day, but the only fresh fruit they ate all week.
Almost a decade on, in my first week as children’s secretary, I spent a day at a Banbury secondary school. The headteacher explained to me that the school paid for a number of children in each school year to have breakfast in school every day before lessons started. The rationale was simple: it wasn’t just that children from the poorest backgrounds would not have had any breakfast, but they might well not have had anything substantial to eat since their school lunch the day before. If these kids came into school hungry at 9 a.m., they wouldn’t be in a fit state to learn all morning, she explained. But if they got in early, spent an hour between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. having some proper food and calmed down before the start of the school day, their ability to learn was transformed. We took the evidence from that breakfast club and showed it to other schools and local authorities around the country, so they could adopt their own schemes.
In 2007, another major issue we faced was over the standards of food in school, precisely because – as with Yvette’s fresh fruit – the concern was that if children weren’t getting some good healthy nutrition at school each day, they might not be getting any full stop. Shortly before I got the job, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver had fought a hugely successful TV campaign to improve the quality of school lunches, which led to new and demanding nutritional standards overseen by the School Food Trust, chaired by Prue Leith. School food was improving, but both Jamie and Prue were worried that many children were eating unhealthy packed lunches. And new evidence was emerging from a pioneering pilot study in Hull which showed that providing free and healthy school meals for all children in primary schools improved not just their health but their ability to concentrate and learn, too. The health secretary was Hull MP Alan Johnson, and he and I agreed to jointly fund some more pilots offering free school lunches for all pupils in a range of local authority areas across the country to test the idea further and make the case for a national scheme.
We decided to launch that plan at the Labour Party Conference in 2008 and, with TV cameras in tow, we drove from Manchester over to Bolton to have lunch at a primary school with a class of five-year olds. Alan was older than me, but thinner. He found it rather easier to sit down in the excruciatingly small and low school dining hall chairs than I did, and easier to get out of them too. As we tucked into our food and chatted to the youngsters, I became increasingly worried that the chair I was sitting in would buckle entirely. What an advert for healthy eating that would be.
Ironically, Alan and I had carefully checked the menu in advance to make sure it was manageable and that we wouldn’t give the newspaper embarrassing pictures. Trying to eat on camera while talking to your fellow diners is notoriously fraught with difficulties, and you have to choose your foods wisely. Anything with gravy, sauce or rice risks ending up on your tie. Lasagne is OK, sausage rolls are fine, especially if they’re from Greggs with individual paper bags to catch the crumbs, but spaghetti is a disaster and a pizza slice is impossible to get delicately into your mouth. Bacon and eggs are fine for breakfast if they’re well done, and you can eat them with a knife and a fork. But trying to eat a bacon sandwich with stringy rind on camera is asking for trouble. What can I say? If only Ed Miliband had asked me in advance.
After the success of our free school meals initiative, I also championed the return of cooking lessons. Many secondary schools had recently invested in new kitchens to improve their school lunches and wanted to put their new facilities to best use. Teaching children to cook was a popular campaign, and a nostalgic one for many parents who remembered those ‘home economics’ classes from their own schooldays. After discussions with the School Food Trust, we came up with the idea of producing a cookbook aimed at secondary school children with simple recipes that they – and their parents – could learn to cook and practice at home.
Celebrity chef Phil Vickery agreed to write a foreword alongside mine and we both appeared on ITV’s This Morning to launch the book and cook one of the recipes. We had just six minutes to chop, cook and eat a chicken stir-fry, while talking about kids learning to cook at the same time. Phil’s speed and precision were brilliant. I just wished, as I saw the camera coming in for a close-up, th
at I had scrubbed my nails harder. That cookbook was sent to every Year 7 pupil in England for two years running. Michael Gove mocked it. But even now I regularly meet people, pupils back then or their parents, who remind me of that cookbook and tell me how it got them started cooking at home in their family.
While I was working on schools’ and children’s policy, the global financial crisis was taking hold. Although we did our best to support people through the crisis, with Gordon Brown leading the world in staving off a global depression, no one was surprised when Labour lost the 2010 general election. I held onto my parliamentary seat in Morley and Outwood, but only just, and it was clear that if David Cameron and the Conservatives ever won a majority in their own right, my seat would almost certainly fall.
We were exhausted that summer after thirteen years of Labour government. But politics never stops. Gordon Brown promptly resigned and the Labour Party plunged straight into a leadership contest. David Miliband, the favourite, was experienced and clearly talented, although, having worked closely with him, I worried he might prove too much of a policy-wonk. Yvette decided she didn’t want to stand, feeling that our kids were still too young for her to take on the extra demands of the top job, so we agreed I should go for it instead. Maybe it was because I did less of the parenting than I should have done, or maybe because I was better at compartmentalising my time; either way, we thought it was more manageable for me. And I suppose, deep down, we knew my closeness to Gordon made my candidacy such a long shot that working out how I’d deal with the pressure of the job was a bit of a moot point.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Ed Miliband decided to stand against his older brother. It was painful to watch – two brothers and their supporters disparaging each other in public and questioning each other’s personality. Ed’s supporters stood outside the scores of hustings meetings we endured that summer with placards screaming ‘Ed Speaks Human’, an attack on his older brother, while David himself openly derided Ed’s judgement at those hustings and criticised what he saw as his pandering to the left. Observing this fraternal struggle, I felt that a deeper family drama was being played out. This wasn’t only a fight to lead the party; it was a struggle over the legacy of their late father, the left-wing academic Ralph Miliband. Standing in the audience at a London School of Economics tribute event for Ralph a few years before, I had seen this battle emerging. David spoke warmly about the man his father was, but distanced himself from his politics, almost dismissing them as part of a bygone age. Ed, on the other hand, spoke passionately about keeping alive the flame of his father’s ideas.
In the 2010 contest, the politics were on Ed’s side and he played them shrewdly. The party wanted a decisive break from the years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and Ed was successfully able to paint David and me as their respective proxies; frustratingly for me, their fraternal struggle drowned out my critique of George Osborne’s misguided austerity. But victory over his brother came at a cost, and not just to their personal relationship. In the years that followed, Ed, for all his talents, could not shrug off the image in voters’ minds as the man who stabbed his own brother in the back, which they thought was disturbing and wrong; and Ed himself never chose to explain that he had done so to protect what he saw as his father’s legacy. Perhaps that would just have added to the sense of soap opera, but at least people might have understood him better. I used to reassure myself that, despite coming third in the leadership contest myself, at least my family Christmases at home would never be as stressful as the Milibands’; and, as one MP said to me, it could have been worse: Yvette and I could have stood against each other. That would have been even more weird – although only just.
Meanwhile, as the leadership election continued, I sadly witnessed Michael Gove dismantling the strategy for children, schools and families that I’d put in place, and watched George Osborne take a hammer to the funding of our school-building programme and ditching our plan to provide free school meals for all pupils. I fought my best against those cuts, and warned of the effects they would have, but in opposition all you can do is complain. I had a painful illustration of that when David Cameron asked the maverick Labour MP Frank Field to review policies designed to tackle child poverty. Incredibly, Field singled out our breakfast clubs as a waste of money which merely allowed middle-class families to get cheap childcare in the mornings. It was a shameful thing to say, and had no basis in evidence, but my complaints fell on deaf ears.
Those years of opposition were tough, and there were continual murmurings against Ed Miliband’s leadership. Yvette and I worked hard in our respective shadow Home Office and shadow Treasury briefs and landed some decent blows on our opposite numbers. In January 2012, we invited our shadow ministers round to our house with their partners for a spot of team bonding and morale boosting for another tough year ahead. I cooked the inevitable lasagne, just as my mum would have done forty years before to serve to my dad’s PhD students, and our children toured the room with bowls of peanuts and crisps. It was a great evening, but we’d forgotten the cardinal rule: if MPs meet for dinner outside of Westminster, then they must be plotting. Sure enough, three days later a double-page spread appeared in the Mail on Sunday with the headline ‘Ed and Yvette’s Lasagne Plot’. We were accused of planning to unseat Ed Miliband, with the guilty shadow ministers in attendance named and shamed for their part in the incipient putsch. Of course, the fact that nothing happened afterwards wasn’t taken as proof that nothing was ever going to happen, just that we’d been thwarted in the act.
While the Tory–Liberal coalition became less and less popular, at no point in that parliament did I ever think we could win a majority. As shadow chancellor, I spent the 2015 election campaign out on the road selling our economic message around the country, supporting our local candidates, and cooking lasagnes for our activists. But it was all to no avail, and of course – having spent more time campaigning round the country than trying to save my own seat – I found myself part of the wreckage on election night.
The next morning felt like a wake, for the party and for me personally, but the one thing I was sure about was that another five years of opposition did not feel like an appealing prospect. And, looking back now at the wild turbulent political years that followed, I’m not sure I was so wrong.
MUM’S LASAGNE
Serves 5
The Mail’s ‘Ed and Yvette’s Lasagne Plot’ headline gave my mum’s lasagne a new political fame and notoriety. ‘The Ed Balls Lasagne’, cooked by the shadow chancellor himself, started to be in demand as an auction item for party and charity fundraisers, often raising thousands of pounds at a time, especially if I also agreed to act as the waiter – something I did once for Action for Stammering Children.
So, here’s the recipe. It is based on how I remember my mum cooking her lasagne and so is heavily influenced by her Italian-American experiences on the US West Coast. Oregano is the magic ingredient and, unusually for a herb, it is better dried than fresh in this dish. I use Cheddar cheese, but you can mix it with Parmesan if you want. It also keeps well, in the fridge or frozen. If you want to eat some more the next day, you can reheat it in the oven or the microwave, but I think there is always a danger it will turn out dry. Much better to slop a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and fry the lasagne until it is hot and crisping up nicely. Divine.
INGREDIENTS
2 tbsps olive oil
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 ½ medium carrots, peeled and finely chopped
450g beef mince
400g tin of peeled plum tomatoes
500ml stock – I use liquid chicken stock as I’ve found beef to be too strong
400ml water (use it to rinse out the tomato tin to get any dregs)
½ tube tomato purée
1 tbsp dried oregano
Salt and pepper
2 tbsp plain flour
2 tbsp butter
60
0ml whole milk
200g strong cheese, grated – Cheddar, Parmesan or a mix of the two
Lasagne sheets
METHOD
Heat the olive oil in a wok or big pan and add the chopped onion, garlic and carrot. After 5 minutes, add the beef mince and brown. Add the tinned plum tomatoes (I chop them up in the pan), stock and water. Then squeeze in the tomato purée, season with salt and pepper and a good tablespoon of dried oregano. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 mins until thickened.
For the white sauce, melt the butter, add the flour and whisk for a minute. Pour in the milk slowly, whisking as you go. Bring to the boil to thicken, whisking regularly. Allow to cool for 5 minutes and then add the grated cheese and whisk in thoroughly before seasoning.
In a large glass dish/roasting tin with sides, put a little over half of the meat sauce in the pan, cover with lasagne sheets, then spread over half of the cheese sauce. Layer over the rest of the meat sauce, cover with lasagne sheets and top it all with the rest of the cheese sauce.
Bake at 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4 for 40 mins.
STIR-FRY CHICKEN
Serves 4
This chicken stir-fry recipe is our kids’ favourite go-to dish for a quick, tasty meal, and the first one they have experimented with for themselves. It’s based on the original, simple recipe in our cookbook for secondary school pupils, Real Meals, but with a bit of extra spice and complexity. My standard version uses French green beans, broccoli and pak choi, but the kids are always inventing new varieties, including a vegetarian version without the chicken, and a fishy version using prawns instead. The lemongrass and ginger are optional and you can vary the amount of chilli, soy and fish sauce, or ditch them entirely and use a ready-made black bean sauce or oyster sauce. I like medium noodles, but thick noodles also work really well. Once you start, the variations are endless.