This week's column

My Notts column from this week, click to go to full article...

DAVID Cameron once called Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls the most annoying man in British politics. It was a brutal description, but perfectly true.

I imagine it is even a badge Balls is quite proud of, in the same way a trouble-making youth has no qualms telling peers about his asbo.

Indeed, in the scoff-fest of the Commons floor it helps to be highly annoying, it distracts your opponents and knocks them off guard and Balls is a master.

Speech envy

Nottingham East MP Chris Leslie is managing to speak an awful lot in all sorts of Commons debates.

Leslie is a former minister who used to be MP for Shipley before getting voted out in 2005, only to return as a Nottingham MP in 2010.

In fact he's proved so effective at catching the Speaker's eye – he seems to have stood up to speak in debates every day this week – that some other members are getting jealous.

One particularly frustrated Labour MP suggested to me that if “that Leslie” was called to speak before him one more time, he would "nail the honourable member’s knees to the bench".

And people say Labour isn’t progressive anymore.

Leadership race hots up...

Lobbydog understands that Ed Balls will launch his leadership campaign tomorrow.

I was wondering what was taking him so long.

Before I’d heard the most recent whispers about tomorrow’s launch, several people had been enthusiastically pledging support to his cause.

They included former minister Chris Leslie – the man who ran Gordon Brown’s campaign to be Labour leader.

Leslie, former MP for Shipley, was re-elected to Parliament as the MP for Nottingham East on May 6.

He told me: “The reason why Ed Balls has the edge is that I think he has a better sense, a finger on the pulse if you like, of what’s going on in the country at large.”

“There are several things you need to be a leader – one is to be media savvy, another is that you need to be able to perform in the Commons.

“But crucially you need to be able to connect with people north of Watford.”

The party man is in to Nottngham East...

So Chris Leslie has been selected as the Labour candidate for Nottingham East – an event about as surprising as a boiled potato.

The news came out this afternoon, but as ever I promise to bring something new to the table.

As Jim P at the FT correctly suggests this selection will be seen as an incident of parachuting.

There was of course an attempt to pay lip service to the local party by including three local candidates on a shortlist of nine.

Each of the nine were then given interviews by the “special selection panel”.

BUT, Lobbydog hears that the candidates were given five minutes each to make a mini-presentation and were then questioned for ten – 15 minutes each in total.

Given that the incumbent John Heppell has been in the seat for 18 years, as may his predecessor be, it seems an awfully short amount of time.

“But it’s so close to the election, we needed to do things quickly,” cry the Labour powers that be.

If that was the case then why didn’t they let the local party organise a hustings and selection on Monday, as they suggested doing, to finish the job two days earlier.

The reason is, of course, that the upper echelons of Labour wanted their man and got him.

It does not sound like there is an appetite for the local party to put up an independent in protest though, as has happened in Stoke Central.

That may be because the leading local candidate, Nottingham City Council Leader Jon Collins, is not everyone’s favourite bunny.

Collins apparently wanted the seat badly and had gone the extra mile in terms of lobbying for it.

But word has it that the unions effectively vetoed him from getting the seat during a meeting in Downing Street, because they had a vendetta to settle over a spat in Nottingham.

Never mind Jon – only another 18 years to wait. I’m sure the unions will have got over it by then.