The revelations from Ed Balls' new book tell us a lot about Corbyn's Labour suicide cult – and Strictly Come Dancing

Predictably, he lacerates Jeremy Corbyn as an unelectable idealist terminally ill-suited to combat politics, and who could argue there? Less predictably, Balls lacerates himself for failing to persuade Gordon to call the 2007 honeymoon election he would have won

Strictly is the ideal way for Ed Balls to complete his self-rebranding (Getty)

Ed Balls Day has been a righteous cause for national celebration for years, but is the country ready for the inaugural Ed Balls Night?

It’s coming, ready or not, on Saturday when the worlds of high politics and high camp collide on BBC1.

The former cabinet minister will make his eagerly awaited hoofing debut on Strictly Come Dancing’s seasonal return, and I think I speak for us all by saying that it cannot come soon enough.

Now there was a time, not so long ago, when Blinky’s appearance on Strictly would have been taken for an eternally-binding resignation from public life. It’s one thing for old timers like Edwina Currie and Widders to make a few bob and sate the craving for attention. But it’s a little different for a guy yet to turn 50, and still in what might pass for his prime, to throw in the careerist towel by donning the blouse to audition for a spot on the Biggins panto undercard.

Yet here in Trumpworld the traditional boundaries between politics and entertainment no longer exist. So it could be that Balls sees Strictly and the popularity it confers as the ideal way to complete the self-rebranding – from universally despised Brownite schemer to self-deprecating guy you’d love a pint with – he began at the Morley and Outwood count last May.

On balance you have to doubt this. For one thing, who in their right mind would want to rejoin the suicide cult known as “the Labour Party” in the foreseeable?

For another, Ball’s concession speech when he lost his seat did so much to humanise him that he doesn’t need all the elephantine gyrating and forced grinning beneath the glitterballs to transform his image. After a nerve-shredding all-night count, he accepted his defeat with a grace and humility seldom on view when he made those playground hand gestures at Messrs Cameron and Osborne from the front bench. At that moment of ultimate humiliation, he was marvellous. That should stand him in good stead as the voting public, not to mention Len Goodman and the gang, tire of his tragicomic interpretations of the Charleston and Tango.

Anyway, there were more solid reasons for Ed Balls to accept the role of The Idiot on Strictly 2016. The dosh, for one. Balls wouldn’t don the silken blouse for a farthing less than £100,000. Also, there is the guarantee of dramatic weight loss from all that aerobic training, and (speaking as one) what portly middle aged schlub wouldn’t be tempted by that?

And then there is the happy synchronicity whereby the publication of his new memoir, ‘Speaking Out’, coincides with Strictly’s return. The only reliable way to shift non-fiction these days is via a high-ratings TV show presence.

Judging by the newspaper serialisation, the book is the familiar political memoirist’s pot pourri of embellished anecdote (Gordon Brown choosing to finish a speech on a rapidly descending Concorde they thought was about to crash) and subtly self-aggrandising score-settling (Ed Miliband freezing him out of policy and campaign decision making; Balls doesn’t say that was why they lost so badly, but the hint hangs delicately in the air).

Predictably, he lacerates Jeremy Corbyn as an unelectable idealist terminally ill-suited to combat politics, and who could argue there? Less predictably, Balls lacerates himself for failing to persuade Gordon to call the 2007 honeymoon election he would have won.

If it seems unusually well written by the standards of the genre, Balls emerges as an unusually engaging character, if only by the standards of his previous persona of serpentine thug.

The lasting impression, recalling his front bench histrionics, is that he belongs to a peculiarly British order known as Clever Fools – exceedingly bright people with reserves of common sense and judgement in inverse proportion to their intellects. But with the distinction that Balls either has or can convincingly effect the sole quality which guarantees forgiveness and affection in Britain for the previously loathed: a knack for laughing at himself.

This branch of self-awareness was not visible during his long years as a swaggering bully boy, first as Gordon’s Treasury enforcer, then as Education Secretary, when his sacking of Sharon Shoesmith over the Baby P tragedy exhibited a distasteful mixture of opportunistic calculation and cowardice in the face of tabloid blood lust.

Whether Labour would have avoided its 2015 cataclysm had Miliband never made him shadow chancellor, we cannot know. But we must suspect that Balls’ presence didn’t help, because until recently he had the Sidam touch. Like Midas in reverse, everything he touched turned to filth: after he became the club’s new chairman last December, for instance, Norwich City’s form duly collapsed until they were relegated a year almost to the day after the voters demoted him from Parliament.

Thankfully, all that is buried deep in the past. So let’s leave it there to decompose, just as he has had to leave the task of making sense of Labour’s self-destructive madness to Yvette Cooper, his missus, and the other poor sods who kept their jobs.

He embarks on the winding road to national treasuredom with the clear hindsight that losing his seat was not a personal disaster, at it seemed then, but a gigantic stroke of luck. If the producers want a fitting ballad for Ed Balls’s Strictly debut dance, they might do worse than Nick Berry’s 1986 number one, Every Loser Wins.