EMQs: What's your most embarrassing moment as a politician?

0:00The Chancellor of the Exchequer. Getting a lesson from the Shadow Chancellor on how to balance the books is like getting a lesson from Dracula on how to look after a bloodbath. Ed Balls. A steady as she goes budget. What kind of ship does he think he's on, the Titanic? Bermar, Celeste. Welcome to EMQs from Political Currency with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

0:26So hello and welcome to EMQs, Ex-Ministers' Questions. Christmas is almost here it's last minute Christmas shopping time I love going Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve because I like the buzz and the challenge of last minute decision making are you a late Christmas shopper? well not as late as you, that sounds a bit like supermarket sweep to be honest, like running through the store no I've basically done my Christmas shopping you have not? oh my I haven't done any of mine yet but that is that is that is ridiculous oh but before we get on to emqs um there's a bit of confusion about your failure to remember who your politician of the year was 2025 but producer ellie has looked it up and i'm i'm afraid george no it's good to be accountable and maybe there was some deep logic to this i haven't seen but elon musk and angela rayner were your two politicians of the year what happened to them eh well indeed well hold on first of all it was the award for 2024 not the award for 2025 oh you are right so it was backward looking it wasn't a prediction second i think you would say at the beginning of uh this year they were both riding high and you know have they had such uh you know in such a bad place there uh elon musk got a one trillion dollar pay award this year he's still quite rich if that's a bad year i'd like to see a good year but how's his political career going he certainly had um moments when he felt like he more access than he does at the moment and as for Angela Rayner I find this personally quite surprising and you know the reason I nominated her last year was because I thought she'd established herself in the cabinet she was her own had her own identity and she was in a pretty strong position but the entirely self-inflicted mistakes over the tax she paid led to her resignation I find it quite surprising that everyone says she's nailed on to be the next leader of the Labour Party or you know she's one of those most serious challenges to keir starmer because i think all that tax stuff will come back again if um she runs again but anyway maybe not but you know from her point of view it's pretty depressing to have to leave the government but people are still talking her up look i think the term her political career is not over but it will all depend upon um the conclusion of investigation still underway but the only thing i'd say is uh if you were street you'd be nervous he's gonna get a trillion dollar pay award okay if he's gonna give it to the doctor i don't think he's in it for the money anyways we should get on with our emq shouldn't we we should the other thing i just just like to commend i think at the beginning of the year we went through a phase of asking people where they were sending emqs in from and what they were doing you remember we had glassblowing artists and people on road trips and people feeding stem cell cultures while sending in their questions let's be clear they were doing that in a laboratory under supervised conditions as part of their job you're making it sound like we've got a bunch of wackos in the basement my dad was one of the the world experts on alternatives to animal whole animal experimentation using cell and tissue culture and he wasn't a wacko he was a scientist so it's fine we had questions this year from ready india washington dc connecticut blue mountains in australia Helsinki, Finland, Seattle, Taipei, Taiwan, Melbourne, Dubai, Toronto, Ontario, Lake Arrowhead, Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, Auckland, Institute of Florence, North Carolina.

3:54I mean, even from a paddleboarder in Israel. Talk about global reach. You missed Baden-Württemberg. Oh, sorry. And that as well. Yeah, that wasn't deliberate. I was intimidated by the umlaut. Should we get on to our first question. Yeah, our first question, you know, it's that time of year when you repeat certain traditions. And we've got another question this year from your colleague on GMB, Susanna Reid. Very regular listener to this podcast. She loves it. Hello, Ed and George. Susanna Reid here from Good Morning Britain. So I have two questions for you. The first is mine, which is having seen that photograph of Lord Mandelson caught short after you locked him out of your dinner party, George, what is the most embarrassing moment that either of you has had publicly caught on camera?

4:46The second question is prompted by ChatGPT because, George, you're taking up a job at open AI, so presumably you want us all replaced by artificial intelligence. My prompt was, please send me a funny question to ask two experienced politicians who now run a political podcast. And this is Chat's suggestion. Between the two of you, who has spent more time waiting for meetings to start? and what could the country have achieved with all those lost hours? I'll be interested to know which one you prefer. Happy Christmas. All those lost hours. I cannot tell you how many lost hours I've had. Although in government, I think I was always the one a bit late for meetings because I was always letting the last meeting overrun.

5:33So I was probably responsible. But I mean, what could I have done with all the lost hours waiting for George to arrive for this podcast or turn up for meetings? I mean, sadly, Susanne, I could make no contribution to the public interest because, you know, I was out of politics by that time. But there have definitely been some lost hours. And what about your photograph, your most embarrassing photograph? Well, I mean. Wasn't it when you knocked that bloke off a bike with your car door or something? That was actually quite, that's quite a good one. Getting out of a government car and knocking somebody over.

6:07I'm not sure I've ever been caught short. By the way, you know, at the Water Rats, we actually made an announcement on Tuesday night, the Centrist Dad gig. We said anybody who is getting an Uber home, rest assured that the public toilets here will be open for the next hour. So there's no need to use a tree. We just wanted to make that clear for people who, you know, this wasn't George Osborne's house where you couldn't come back in to use the restroom. What my most embarrassing moment, me and Andy Burnham on the ropes wing was pretty bad. But that was like a political moment rather than a personal moment.

6:36I think my closest to embarrassing moment is this 2010 leadership election we had had um the Saturday night Labour Party conference we'd had our late night party when I'd lost we had a good party and on the Sunday morning I was playing the annual football match the MPs against journalists there were always embarrassing photos taken of me at that game and I was going I could only play the first half because then I had to be interviewed um on the Sunday programs by John Sopel at lunchtime And I was a bit worse to wear that morning because, you know, I'd just lost the Labour leadership and been quite late.

7:09And I played this first half of this game and I felt for the whole first half, I might need to throw up, which would have been a really embarrassing moment because of all the TV cameras and the photographers. And then I got a cab back to go on live with John Sopel. And I thought to myself, can I be lucky twice? Can I get through this interview without throwing up? So I made a judicious decision to consciously throw up in that half hour between coming back from the football and going live on the television in order to make sure that I wasn't then caught short personally. And I'm not sure this is good advice for aspiring politicians.

7:43It's a high risk strategy. I do think it's also answering Susanna's question, which she would be the first on your show to do if you heard us on Politician Running. What is the most embarrassing moment that either of you has been publicly caught on camera? Well, so I'm saying it was almost throwing up on the football pitch. Being stuck on a rope swing with Andy Burnham, unable to get off and not knowing how to stop was also kind of embarrassing. Also, the Daily Mail photographing me when I was doing stretches and exposing my midriff. That was also pretty embarrassing. Oh, yes, I remember that one.

8:13First of all, can I defend Peter Mandelson? Which is, you know, when he came to my house and then he left and then the Ubers didn't come and so on. You know, the reason he didn't want to come back was we are very young children. And he didn't want to wake up the children. that is the reason he didn't come back and i thought you wouldn't open the door for him again but uh that was what he was actually thinking about uh my young family at the time and i feel very sorry for what has happened and me i agree very much very much agree with that but in terms of embarrassing photo i think the worst i mean the various photos of me when i was young that made their way into the tabloids when i became a politician but the video of me trying to skip in a school skip to be fit was i beat you hands down on that it wasn't i literally think anyone could have beaten me i assumed actually i mean i guess i knew it was being videoed but it wasn't there was no tv camera it was just in the local in the local schools and um unfortunately um lots of people did get to see this um see this video as for me as for time wasted well i mean i despite your experience on the podcast when i was in government i ran a pretty tight ship in terms of meetings and i learned that from william haig william haig had a very straightforward rule which is if you were not on time by which mean you know the meeting starts at two o 'clock if you arrive at 201 you were not allowed in the room full stop doesn't matter how important you were and uh can i say this is not a rule we've applied to political currency it's not a rule this is political currency with ed balls yes there'd be no george osborne in half of them no no but you know i heard this story when he became foreign secretary you know he had like the first meeting as foreign secretary on like middle eastern policy or something like that you know meeting starts at two and you know three or four five minutes past two ten minutes past two the various gendrams of the foreign office the mandarin's walk in uh to the outer office to start the meeting and you know the new foreign secretary anyway the private secretary says to them rather embarrassed says look um the foreign secretary won't allow you in the meeting it was like what well the meeting started at two o 'clock and it's five minutes past two and then they go okay well when's when's the meeting rescheduled yeah we're really embarrassed and sorry he says oh no no he's having the meeting now and one junior foreign office official had turned up on time and was sitting opposite the foreign secretary having the meeting everyone else was excluded and as a result no one was ever late for meeting with William Hague again.

10:47And he did the same thing to us when I worked for him in opposition. And it's not, I mean, I was never quite like that as Chancellor. Are you advising this as a good strategy? It's not a bad strategy to make sure people turn up on time in meetings where it's essential they're there. Right, right. George Osborne yesterday will be five minutes late. Do you know what I replied? What? I'll be on time. Thank you, Susanna, for exposing this rift. I think her actually doing a chat GPT question it was a very smart question Gosh what a brilliant technology I wonder who makes it I know Shall we go on to our next question?

11:20Our next question comes from John Hello Ed, hello George John from Wandsworth here Love the podcast Can Ed please explain his joke that is quoted at the start of every episode as I don't think it actually works Why would George think he was on the Titanic or the Mary Celeste if he was pursuing a steady as she goes budget? Well, it's a very good question, John. I mean, if you're trying to get me to explain the point of Ed Ball's jokes, I can't. So, Ed? It's always very bad any time you have to explain a political joke. So I can see John's literal point. But I think taking you back to the time, George had done a budget which was briefed in advance that it was going to be a steady as she goes budget.

12:05and then it turned out to be taking the economy into quite choppy waters. And I was pointing out, well, if you think that is a steady-as-she-goes budget, if you're the kind of captain of the ship saying, steady-as-she-goes, that is exactly the kind of thing which must have been said at the time by the captain of the Titanic before they hit the iceberg and the captain of the Mary Celeste before they hit the bottom. So that was the joke. That's not what happened to the Mary Celeste. What happened to the Mary Celeste? You don't even know the provenance of your own poor jokes. Mary Celeste was found floating on the water with no one on board.

12:35It remains a mystery to this day what happened to everyone on board the ship. Yeah, but the people were all on the bottom. They must have been... We don't know. They might have gone on another ship. Or they got eaten. I don't know. No one knows at the whole point. There was clearly a shipwreck. There wasn't a shipwreck. That's the whole point. The ship wasn't wrecked. The ship was totally intact, floating on the water. But when people boarded the ship, they found no one there. It was like, that's the whole point about it. It's like a ghost ship. What happened to them? That's the whole point. It's a mystery.

13:02That's why we're still talking about the Mary Celeste. 100 years on. Let's take a break.

13:15Welcome back. Our next question comes from someone who sits around the cabinet table. That is Nick Thomas Simmons. Hi, George and Ed. Always enjoy the podcast. George, well done for your excellent Harold Wilson impression. However, I wanted to point out that Harold said, I know what is going on, I am going on, on the 4th of May 1969 at his May Day rally speech to shrug off plotting when Labour was in government, not after the general election defeat of 1970. Actually, he went on after that to remain leader for seven more years and to win two more general elections in 1974. When do you both remember the leaders you served being at their most resilient?

14:05Well, first of all, I stand corrected by Nick. And Nick sent me a message about this. And he's also sent me a copy of his book, his biography of Harold Wilson, The Winner, which I'm definitely going to read over the break. And I read many years ago, Ben Pimlott's book about Harold Wilson, which was excellent. But I'm really, really looking important to Nick's. And I think Nick has had a really good year in politics because he's been in charge of the relationship with the EU and negotiating these complicated trade deals and things like the Erasmus scheme, which we've just rejoined. So, you know, he can look back on the last year as a year where he's really achieved some meaningful things.

14:43I'd always assumed Harold Wilson said that when he was in opposition. I didn't know he said it when he was in government. It is one of my favorite quotes. So I absolutely stand corrected. And what he's doing there is he's sort of acknowledging speculation about his leadership. He's not sort of living in the clouds. He's not sort of pretending there's no challenge to his leadership, but he's sort of taking it head on and then using kind of humor to demonstrate that, you know, he's the big guy. And it's obviously a very, very hard judgment to make when you're in politics. You know, do you acknowledge there's a sort of threat to your position?

15:17I mean, that's the kind a key challenge. And by doing so, it could be seen as a sign of weakness. But I think sometimes it's the right thing to do because it shows you're in touch and come and get me is the sort of message. And in terms of leaders being the most resilient, directly to Nick's question, I mean, I think the person who endured, you know, really an unbelievable torrent of abuse when I worked for him was William Hague. He was absolutely ridiculed as leader of the opposition. And it wasn't just that, you know, people were having a go at his poor poll ratings or, you know, having a go at the Conservatives who had been in office for a long time.

15:58There was a deliberate, sustained effort organised by the Labour High Command at the time to kind of belittle him and make fun of how he looked and how he sounded. and there was one particular incident at the Labour Party conference where a Labour MP who's now passed so I won't kind of bring it up particularly but made a fun about him looking like a fetus and that was all deliberately designed to get some bad Labour headlines off the front page because then the leadership could discipline this Labour MP and I have to say I learned a lot from it And it made me and the people who worked for William Hague absolutely kind of battle hardened.

16:40And I think if I've got a kind of regret, when we then came to kind of Gordon Brown, taking on Gordon Brown in opposition, we always said, we remember what you guys did to William Hague in terms of the personal attacks. And we won't hold back, which I don't think was particularly edifying. And it's something I think with sort of hindsight, I regret. But I remember at the time, every time someone said, you're being really unfair about Gordon Brown and his personality, I would say, but you lot did that to my friend William a few years earlier. And he was, William was very resilient through it. And of course, you know, triumphed in terms of coming back to politics as foreign secretary and, you know, and chancellor of Oxford University now and so on.

17:18So you as shadow chancellor gave out that treatment to Gordon Brown as prime minister. Did Gordon Brown as shadow chancellor give out that treatment to William Hague? Well, we won't have to go into it all, but there were some pretty vicious personal attacks on me also that came not from you, but from the broader Brown team, if you remember. I still have Gordon Brown's letter of apology in his own handwriting to me. I guess in that period, 2008-2009, when Gordon Brown was under a great deal of political pressure, political attacks, the polls were bad. I guess to answer Nick's questions, in terms of resilience, probably staying focused on the G20 saving the global economy.

17:58This was a pivotal moment and you had to not be thrown off course. That was probably his most resilient moment. But as you say, at a time when politics was pretty tough. Do you think it's as tough now? Yeah, I guess so. I think it's tougher, isn't it, on social media? What you don't have is the kind of all-powerful tabloids in the way that, I mean, they're still around, but they could be really, really aggressive, couldn't they? Of course, to go back to Nick's question, the irony of his correction to you is that Howard Wilson went on until he suddenly didn't, until suddenly, out of the blue, not at a general election, not as something he was forced to do, he made his own decision to walk away.

18:42So he carried on until he didn't carry on. I mean, I think it was health-driven, but it wasn't expected in 1976. No, I think, isn't he the only Prime Minister who's ever just sort of voluntarily announced he's going? Yeah. I mean, people will say David Cameron maybe, but it just lost the referendum. So it was very different. There was no catalytic moment equivalently for Howard Wilson in 76. Our next question is from Alex. Hi, Ed and George. Thank you so much for the podcast. It really is one of the highlights of my week. I want to get in touch, not with a question, but to tell you about my experience as a Jewish person in the UK following the awful events in Australia.

19:23I'm a skullcap, a yarmulke wearing Jew working in financial services and my wife works for the NHS. I am born and bred in Britain. I have never seen any conflict between being Jewish and being British. On the contrary, the values of honesty, integrity, good humour and self-deprecation are common to both. It is not easy being a Jew in the UK at the moment. There is barely a Friday night meal that I go to these days where the conversation does not lead to plans for departure. We feel that the writing is on the wall for our community in this country. What happened in Manchester was a symptom of this trend, far from an isolated incident.

19:57whilst I'm grateful for the government's support for the CSD and the Holocaust Educational Trust their unwillingness to deal robustly with anti-Semitism is unquestionably making matters significantly worse on our part we are considering whether it would be the right thing to do to raise our children in this country whether we are simply kicking the can down the road for a worse problem for them to face that was such a powerful um an important statement from um from Alex there and And, you know, George, you will know, because both you and I have close friends who have lived the same experience Alex and his family are living through at the moment.

20:37And, you know, he's right that on the Labour side, the shadow of the Corbyn years and that anti-Semitism is still there, still raises a question in people's minds. I think Keir Starmer's very personal reasons for it emphatically to dispel that. But those things are remembered and take time. It feels to me this is going to be such an important issue in 2026 and something which we will definitely return to in the coming weeks and months. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what a powerful statement. Any citizen in this country should be embarrassed that Alex and his family feel this way. whatever your views on the Middle East or Gaza or that's it you know citizens of this country should not feel intimidated or scared when they go out in public or when they wear religious symbols and for people who say well there are some Muslims who feel intimidated when they get confronted street I absolutely agree as well that is totally unacceptable and I think we've kind of let it drift a bit and it's quite hard you know because it also gets entangled with the sort of policing of free speech.

21:40But it is clearly a very, very serious problem. And it leads to violence. And we saw that tragic set of murders in Australia. And, you know, we will continue to have incidents like that if we don't really lean into it. Where I would hopefully say to Alex, you know, to sort of bear with these Western democracies is, you know, actually countries can get their act together and lean into problems when they've identified problems. I know Australia is trying to do that right now. And I think we know we've got a problem. I woke up this morning hearing on the news that the police were going to be tougher and the policing of some of the things that are said at rallies.

22:17And, you know, this is not, you've got to have some sympathy for, you know, it's hard to police these rallies and so on. But I think that's a good sign that we're leaning into it and the state is getting its act together. And with the support of things, I know you're obviously deeply involved in the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial that's coming and the Community Security Trust. Britain and other countries need to get their act together. It's been allowed to drift and people have lost their lives as a result. The statement from the chief constables of Greater Manchester and the Met saying that they were going to take action of the use of that terrible language, very, very important.

22:54They said that the CPS had been advising them it didn't pass the threshold and they're disagreeing and publicly acting. I think that was good leadership. Let's take a break. And Alex, we promise not to let this issue lie in the coming weeks and months. And we'll come back after the break.

23:17Welcome back. Our final question today, and it's I think one of the hardest questions we've had on EMQs, is from Rosemary. I'm not going to say I love the podcast, even though I do. but I must add it's so good at putting into perspective what's happening in the world as nowhere at least that I can find does. I don't have a serious question but I do have a silly one. Where does Father Christmas do his Christmas shopping? She does say she loves the podcast. She says she won't say she loves the podcast but she actually then says she does. She does. Let me go first here because I think this is, you know, we're going to end where we began our main podcast this week.

23:55I was looking at this question from Rosemary thinking there's definitely a joke here you know isn't there like a cracker joke um what is the answer to this question so I decided I would go to chat GPT and ask chat GPT which I was just doing while we were while you were talking what is the answer to the joke question where does father Christmas do his Christmas shopping and chat gpt replies the usual punch line is at a santander yeah right and then it says bracket santa dash under i thought that what it says you'll also sometimes hear variants like at the mall dash north pole but santander is the classic wordplay answer and i thought what's chat gpt onward on about i mean that makes no sense and then i remembered of course the one problem of gpt is actually not very good at humor i think ai at the moment finds telling jokes and interpreting humor and so the reply it gave me to raise me's joke was entirely unfunny are you going to sort that out susanna reed was worrying at the beginning of with her question about whether ai was going to take over the role of television presenters but let me just say on the basis of its contribution here it's not going to take over from the comedian well i would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do which is doing what a what a human being would do because that is the kind of jokes you've been getting in crackers for the last hundred years sorry at a santander what does it mean right there's a bank called santander yeah but you wouldn't go christmas shopping at a bank no but it's santa santa is a play on the word santa but it's not funny apparently rosemary thinks we should say the elf service shop which i think demonstrates that the chat gpt is as good as the human beings are coming up with these jokes look there must be somebody out there who knows a funny answer cracker jokes are supposed to be not very funny no but they're supposed to be corny that is some underlying humor in there i mean there's nothing in neither chat gpt you me or rosemary have come up with anything which one could describe as funny i've got to suddenly charge this laptop or it's about to go off well george's laptop is about to go off so on that basis i think we're going to have to end are emqs before we collapse yes um thank you for your question rose i think we've ended on it i mean you know see how tech savvy i am i goodness my joke about the mary celeste and um the titanic is funny because um you just didn't know what you didn't know anything about the mary celeste anyway that's all we've time for in this episode of emqs yes please do keep sending us your voice notes and emails uh questions at political currency.co.uk make sure you review the shows it helps us to reach more listeners and we'll be back next week with a special guest episode with me having a chat with last year's Politician of the Year, Ed Davey.

26:40Can't wait to hear that. See you then. See you soon.

26:49Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persephoneca production.