Ed Balls happy to team up with Lib Dems

Ed Balls insisted today that he would "happily" sit in a cabinet with the Liberal Democrats and said he "always wanted to be part of Tony Blair's team". The Labour leadership contender sets out his stall in an interview with the Guardian's Polly Toynbee today, in which he also says he tried in vain to persuade his wife and fellow former minister, Yvette Cooper, that she would have made a "great" leader. Balls also used the wideranging interview to lambast the "nonsense" being peddled by the coalition government about there being no choice but to introduce deep cuts in public spending, and the Lib Dems' belated conversion to the Tory argument. But Balls also reserved criticism for Labour over its failure to put forward the alternative argument about the pace of deficit reduction "with sufficient vigour". On the push for voting reform – a key Lib Dem priority – Balls said he would campaign for replacing first past the post with AV "if it were done properly". But he said "the way Nick Clegg and David Cameron are going about this is not right". He rejected the suggestion that Labour's differences with the Liberal Democrats would make it impossible for Labour to work with Nick Clegg's party in the future. "There's no doubt that the way the Liberal Democrats have acted in the last few weeks have made it difficult. There is no doubt at all about that. They have made it very difficult for themselves internally. In an AV system – or a first-past-the-post – there will be times when there is a hung parliament, and therefore I said before the election I will very happily sit in a cabinet and serve with the Lib Dems and that is why I was happy to play a constructive part in the talks afterwards [the general election]. But not at the price of principle, not at the price of fundamental issues in our manifesto." He added: "It's very early days to work out what is going to happen to the Lib Dem party ... but could I imagine serving in coalition or in a cabinet with the Liberal Democrats, of course." Balls said he had started the leadership election as the "underdog" because of the "shadow of history with Gordon and Tony". He had three months to show he could turn things round, he said, pointing to the fact that votes do not start to be cast until 1 September. On lessons learned from the tensions between Blair and Brown during Labour's first decade in power, when Balls was closely allied to Brown, he said effective leadership was about putting together a team of people who believe in each other as well as a cause to stick together when times get difficult. "The truth is that this is not something Tony managed to do, and it isn't something Gordon managed to do. In both cases in the end it's a black mark against their ability to lead. "The truth is, I always wanted to be part of Tony Blair's team but the trouble was, that sense of [being] 'Blair' or 'Brown' defined how Gordon saw the world, how Tony saw the world, from those very early stages."