After a shocker of an interview with Eddie Mair on Wednesday, in which Ed Balls was unable to give an answer to where he had differed from Gordon Brown in terms of policy over the last three years, his Mirror piece today shows just how tainted he is. He tries to admit, like all the others, that now they see that they lost and that they need to listen more, not that they weren’t listening before of course. This seems to be the only message of the whole contest so far.

Most interesting was what he didn’t say. There is not one mention of the deficit in the whole piece. Instead he uses cheap shots of the sort that Brown was churning out in his lowest days:

“And then on Monday, I watched George Osborne on TV struggling to contain his glee as he announced that the Tories, now backed by the Liberal Democrats, were going to cut £6billion from public services this year and put the school-building programme on hold.”

No wonder he is struggling to get the signatures to even get on the ballot. Many of the new Labour intake are holding back their support, waiting to see who else comes out of the woodwork. How long before it all gets rather nasty as Balls fights for his life?