Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesProfiling Ed Balls’ personality through his pig doodle
Posted on June 12, 2011There’s a simple personality profiling test called the Pig Test. You draw a doodle of a pig, and the way you do so is used to give a sketch outline of your personality type. (If you want to take the test yourself, please draw a pig now, because the details in the rest of this post will otherwise influence your results). It’s not perfect, but it’s an amusing little way to give a broadbrush insight into what you or your friends are like.
How convenient, then, that the Ed Balls Files released by the Telegraph this week feature a doodle of a pig drawn by Ed Balls himself:
So according to the rules of the Pig Test, what does it tell us about Ed Balls’ personality?
First, the doodle is located at the top of the page, which apparently should mean “you are perceived as a positive
and optimistic person by others.” (I did say it wasn’t perfect).
Next, we look at the direction the pig is facing – Ed’s piggywig is looking out of the page directly at us, indicating “you are a direct person; [you] neither fear nor avoid discussion and enjoy “stirring the pot” to promote change.”
The doodle also has more detail than you would normally expect in a picture of a cartoon pig, which means “you see yourself as analytical and cautious. Others must work hard to earn your trust and to keep it.”
The fact the pig has two rather than four legs indicates a sense of insecurity, that “you are living through a period of major change in your life”.
The pig’s ears aren’t unusually large or unusually small, so far as I can see that means Ed is a fairly good listener.
Finally, and most tellingly, there’s the tail. According to the rules of the Pig Test, “the longer the pig’s tail that you have drawn (including loops) the more satisfied you are with the quality of your personal relationships”.
It speaks for itself that Ed Balls’ pig has no tail at all.
Ed Balls – from Green Tax Crusader to Jeremy Clarkson
Posted on March 14, 2011Ed Balls has evidently decided that hammering the Coalition on rising fuel duty and the double-tax on fuel through VAT is the right way to go. Politically, it’s a clever choice – the levels of tax faced by motorists are punitively high, it does harm the economy and it means ordinary taxpayers are often punished for making essential trips to work or to the shops – particularly in rural areas.
Essentially, he is shifting – at least partially – into TaxPayers’ Alliance messaging, casting himself as being on the side of the strivers, the strugglers and the just-getting-by. Heck, he even confessed this morning that maybe the previous Government might have wasted some money, an acknowledgement that seems obvious to the rest of us but is a groundshaking revelation when it comes from Balls.
As well as being political good sense, this is also part of a growing decontamination strategy that Labour are pursuing to shed the negative associations of the stealth taxes and squandered billions of 1997-2010.
The question with any decontamination strategy is “Will it work?”
With Ed Balls, you’ve got to wonder if even his powers of self-delusion will succeed this time. Today, he is an opponent for economic and moral reasons of hammering motorists. In his pomp helping to present and defend the Budget back in 2007, though, he was boasting about the ethical worthiness of, erm, hammering motorists:
That is exactly what we have been doing over the past 10 years with action to shift the tax burden from “goods” to “bads”, and with the work that we have done to support and, indeed, to pioneer international emissions control and trading. In the Budget, we have set out further actions to advance the environment agenda, including…a fuel duty increase of more than inflation
Is it really believable that the Ed Balls who spent a decade squeezing and squeezing motorists until the pips squeaked because driving was “bad” has now seen sense and is fighting on the motorists’ side? It’s about as plausible as Jeremy Clarkson being elected as the next leader of the Green Party.
The No-Confidence Shadow Cabinet
Posted on October 07, 2010The result are in for the election of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet, and it ain’t pretty:
Yvette Cooper – 232
John Healey – 192
Ed Balls – 179
Andy Burnham – 165
Angela Eagle – 165
Alan Johnson – 163
Douglas Alexander – 160
Jim Murphy – 160
Tessa Jowell – 152
Caroline Flint – 139
John Denham – 129
Hilary Benn – 128
Sadiq Khan – 128
Mary Creagh – 119
Ann McKechin – 117
Maria Eagle – 107
Meg Hillier – 106
Ivan Lewis – 104
Liam Byrne – 100
Consider this: there are 257 Labour MPs, meaning that 8 of the 19 Shadow Cabinet Members listed above failed to secure the support of the majority of their colleagues.
Add in Ed Miliband, who was opposed by the majority of his MPs, and that makes 9 out of 20 who don’t even have the backing of their own colleagues.
What legitimacy can an Opposition have if its Leader and almost half his Shadow Cabinet Ministers were elected on a vote of no confidence by the very people who know them best?
Has Gordon gone all Zen?
Posted on September 03, 2010Ed Balls has pulled some pretty outrageous stunts over the years, but this morning’s Today Programme interview took the biscuit.
In response to the question “Have you spoken to Gordon Brown since [Blair's] autobiography came out?”, he replied:
“I spoke to him the night it came out. I said I thought it was pretty one sided and unfair, and he shrugged his shoulders and said…you know…err…in life you should think about the future.”
Are we really meant to believe that? For a start, it even sounded like Balls was making it up on the spot. More fundamentally, when has Gordon Brown ever been known to shrug his shoulders, lackadaisically chalk something down to experience and counsel that you shouldn’t bear grudges? Bearing grudges is practically his only transferable skill!
Either Balls just made that up, or he phoned the wrong Gordon Brown by mistake.