Last night’s @UKLabour Twitter account featured a seriously cringe-worthy and ill-judged contribution to a series of inappropriate Tweets about Ed Balls’ participation on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing show:
We’re not sure how you can top last week, @edballs – but we can’t wait to find out! #Strictly #TeamGlitterballs pic.twitter.com/GyZ0VLWaAw
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) November 19, 2016
Compare this excruciating ‘teamglitterballs’ nonsense with the dry, dutiful tenor of the account’s Tweets on even the most important issues and policy announcements and its ‘fanboy/girl’ style raises serious questions about the agenda (and mentality) of whoever is running the account.
This is just the latest in a line of tweets, with others not much better:
Let's do this @edballs! #TeamGlitterballs #Strictly pic.twitter.com/Ag7jMXW42K
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) October 22, 2016
After last week’s smokin’ samba, we’re wishing @edballs good luck in his paso doble tonight! #Strictly #TeamGlitterballs pic.twitter.com/ah0P7qfmpQ
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) October 15, 2016
Ed Balls enthusiasm and effort on the show can’t be faulted. But so what? His recent record in political terms would get an ordinary member expelled.
Balls’ 2016 autobiography dismissed the change that has turned Labour into a genuine political alternative for the first time in decades and the biggest political party in Western Europe as a ‘leftist utopian fantasy’.
He has shown no hesitation in using his newly-raised profile to appear on TV and even in the right-wing press talk down the party’s electoral chances.
He has consistently backed the damaging, so-called ‘moderates’ who undermined the party’s polling in order to further their own agenda (as shown beyond question by the 9-point swing back to Labour after just a month of their relative silence).
He was one of only 7 MPs to lose their seat to a Tory in 2015 – in Leeds, for goodness’ sake – on a night when Labour took 11 seats from Tories, making his credentials for talking about what is electable less than non-existent.
And when Shadow Chancellor, he was behind Labour’s disastrous ‘Tory lite’ strategy, promising to prolong the Tories’ hideously unfair and self-destructive child-benefit cap.
With a record like this, it’s safe to say that Balls has no part in ‘teamLabour’.
And that the vast majority of Labour’s approaching-600k members are emphatically not in ‘teamglitterballs’ and would join this writer in wishing that he would paso doble straight toward the exit door from Strictly – and from the Labour party.
Along with whoever is responsible for the Balls bollocks on Labour’s social media.