Slips all round as Ed Balls follows in Gordon Brown’s footsteps

It seems Gordon Brown's mini-me, Ed Balls, is prone to the occasional slip of the tongue, just like his beloved leader. At a weekend conference in Yorkshire, the PM's former economic advisor said Britain had entered the most serious global recession for over 100 years. And Downing Street has been busy trying to play it down ever since.

Balls, currently the Children's Secretary and a favourite for Chancellor after Alistair Darling - if Labour stays in power long enough - said: "The economy is going to define our politics in this region and in Britain in the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the next 15 years.

"These are seismic events that are going to change the political landscape... I think that this is a financial crisis more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s and we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy."

Backtracking fast, Balls and Downing Street now insist that he was talking about the unique nature of the global financial crisis and had no intention of suggesting that the current crisis would have a greater impact on ordinary people than the 1930s Depression.

Ooops, there's that D word again: the last time it came up was when Brown made a Freudian slip at PMQs last week, blurting out that "we should agree as a world on a monetary and fiscal stimulus that will take the world out of depression". Another slip of the tongue, Downing Street insisted, just like the infamous December gaffe when Brown claimed he had "saved the world".

Slip or not, the report of Balls's Yorkshire moment was all the Shadow Treasury minister Phillip Hammond needed. "This is a staggering and very worrying admission from a cabinet minister and Gordon Brown's closest ally in the Treasury over the past 10 years," he said. "Is Ed Balls spilling the beans here and telling us that the government sees the situation as slightly more serious than they have tried to portray?"

Meanwhile, the current Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is dropping hints that Brown has told him to delay the Spring Budget - see my report posted earlier today.

THE MOLE: DEPRESSION

LAST UPDATED 11:36 AM, FEBRUARY 10, 2009