What was Ed Balls thinking? Was he thinking at all?

Between Chancellor and Shadow Chancellor, we have two men who have made a complete mess of handling the tax-avoidance issue

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls says he always asks for proof of cash-in-hand payments (PA) (PA)

At some political debacles you want to weep, and at others you have to laugh, but with Ed Balls And His Odd Job Receipts the emotional reaction is different. At this fiasco, you cannot bear to look. You want to leave the room, because this is like one of those Ali G interviews which delicate souls like myself find too excruciating to endure. It is the comedy of gross embarrassment without the comedy.

With any self-inflicted disaster on this scale, the temptation is to recycle a shtick of yore. In this case, it must be resisted. This one is too sad to bear facetious speculation that Balls is a sleeper implanted in Labour High Command by the Tories, to bide his time under deep cover before imploding a future election campaign. And it really is sad. Like B.A. Barachus (Mr T) in The A-Team, I pity the fool. I do, I do. I pity the fool.

Equally futile is asking what Balls can possibly have been thinking. He cannot have been thinking at all. His diktat about the duty, for tax purposes, to demand and keep receipts and personal details from window cleaners, “someone who trims your hedge for a tenner”, and other odd jobbers - as the nebbish claimed he has religiously done since entering politics - must have been caused by some strange neurological reflex; a form of Tourette’s Syndrome too recherche´ even for Oliver Sachs, perhaps, that makes sufferers blurt out observations of belief-beggaring daftness with no clue how stupendously imbecilic they will sound.

Compare and contrast that with the other tax-related farrago of the hour - newly unearthed footage, from 2003, of George Osborne advising “Bill”, a BBC’s Total Politics show viewer, to find “clever financial products” to avoid paying care home costs and trim inheritance tax liability. At least Osborne showed a slither of self-awareness, coyly adding: “I probably shouldn’t be advocating this on television”. Ya think?

On the face of it, video evidence of the Chancellor offering handy hints on how to keep money from the public purse seems a bigger story than Balls’s surreal silliness. It underscores existing doubts the cynic might have about Osborne’s sincerity when he describes aggressive tax avoidance as “morally repugnant”. The phrase “clever financial products” has piercing resonance as the heated debate about the wealthy’s disinclination to pay their share rumbles on. He may have used it ages ago while still on the back benches. But it is the only thing we’ve heard from him on tax avoidance since the HSBC scandal sent him into hiding, and so ought noisily to echo down the years to Labour’s advantage.

Thanks to the man who sits opposite him waggling his arms like a marionette with palsy, any outrage about Osborne’s tax-planning advice is drowned out by the deafening aftermath of Balls’s demented stricture. With the Tory press in election juggernaut mode, hideous fall-out was inevitable.

It took the Daily Mail a day to unearth one John Durning of Pontefract, who has cleaned the windows of the Balls-Cooper West Yorkshire home each month since the year Osborne told “Bill” how to avoid tax. The Mail learned that not once in those dozen years has a receipt been requested from John the Window Cleaner, who may become this election’s Joe the Plumber. Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph raided its MPs’ expenses database to discover that the Balls-Coopers have reclaimed £2,640 for unreceipted odd jobs.

It would overegg the double standards pudding to mention that Balls seems as lax in giving documentary evidence as in demanding it. When he drove into another car last year, he famously departed the scene without leaving a note on the windscreen. Careless prangers are under a strict legal obligation to leave their name and address. The hirers of odd job people are under none at all.

But we risk being diverted from the most destructive aspect of this mirthless farce. It is not Balls’s hypocrisy, damaging though that is. It is the unnerving impression of alien-ness projected by his original statement. Earthlings are not interested in recording transactions, for tax or any purpose, with the odd-jobbing community. It would never cross our minds.

There may be a galaxy far, far away where it would. On the planet Pooter Centaurus, in the constellation of Captain Mainwaring Minor, it might be normal to file away scraps of paper recording every cash payment of 10 kwarkquixxuz to guys who rang the bell offering to replace the dilithium crystal battery in the front porch light. On this world, the notion just sounds crazy - and for a would-be Chancellor at this precise point in the electoral cycle, sounding crazy is much, much worse than being exposed as another officer in Westminster’s army of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do buffoons.

Moving on to the seemliest punishment, it is far too late for Balls to be replaced. Some have long suspected that Ed Miliband, who disowned the lunacy by recognising that hedge funds are worthier of attention than hedge trimmers, will one day reflect that making Balls shadow chancellor cost him power. But that die is cast.

Me, I’d make the punishment fit the crime, seconding Odd Job (filing away a VAT receipt for his services, naturally, from Auric Goldfinger) to guillotine Balls’s head with his bowler. However, there might be legal objections to that. Muted ones, certainly, especially from Miliband, but objections all the same.

So my proposal is this. Ed Balls and George Osborne, whose historic offence of openly advocating tax evasion must not be overlooked, should be legally mandated to spend the next five years touring the provinces together, entertaining audiences in song with their bespoke approaches to personal tax affairs. Yes, yes, I know theirs would be a music hall comedy double act with two straight men. But if Cannon and Ball could make it, why not Osborne and Balls? I mean, wouldn’t you pay top dollar to see George perform “I’m The Man Who Didn’t Break the HSBC Swiss Bank Account Holders of Monte Carlo”, and a ukelele-strumming Ed belting out “When I’m Not Asking For Receipts For Cleaning Windows”?

That two men who deeply hate each other would suffer monstrously from their enshacklement is a bonus. Best of all, as if this needs stating, it would prevent either being Chancellor in the next parliament. Neither, self-evidently, is fit for that.