Quentin Letts settles old scores with Balls

Balls is said to accept that asking Forman, on the show to discuss the arson attack on a Jewish charity’s ambulance fleet, to condemn similar intolerance against Muslims was “clumsy”. ITV is believed to have fielded 17,000 complaints about the incident, and Hind wrote that the ex-shadow chancellor has been warned “from the highest level” about political bias and is being watched “like a hawk” by ITV’s director of news, Andrew Dagnell.

For a euphoric-sounding Letts, here was a chance to settle old scores. He tweeted: “There does seem twitchiness about Ed. I used to appear weekly on the show. Pre-election I told Ed on air he had a conflict of interests and called him ‘Mr Cooper’. He flew into a frightful bate. Never been asked back. Too fat? Too rightwing? Or hit nerve?”

This was a reference to a March 2024 episode of GMB in which Letts made an idiot of himself and Balls responded to the “Mr Cooper” tag by telling him: “Why do you keep saying that? Isn’t that a really patronising thing? You are making a big thing of it, you’ve made remarks twice.

“It’s really patronising to me, of course it is, the idea that I can’t ask you questions on this television programme because I’m married to somebody who has a role in politics.

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“In my experience, people who make those kinds of taunts are people who find it hard to answer the questions, why don’t you answer the question and stop playing silly politics?”

When Letts complained about being interrupted, Balls told him: “I interrupted you when you called me ‘Mr Cooper’ and made a slur on my integrity rather than answering the questions, answer the questions and don’t slander me.”

Letts has been jabbing away at the former Morley & Outwood MP for years. In 2008, he included Balls as one of the guilty men in his book 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain. In 2010 follow-up Bog-Standard Britain, he derided the politician as a “bulgy-eyed berk”, and by 2011 he named Balls and Cooper as the top two most annoying MPs in Britain in a Daily Mail article. 

In 2012, Letts told the Guardian, “Balls is an idiot”, while in the same year he was complaining to Mail readers about the then shadow chancellor’s “mushed-up nose”. In later years, he has described Balls as a “gurning looby”, a “stupid heckler”, a “shouty old brute” and a “foghorn” in possession of “a chunky neck” as well as numerous other insults. Letts has compared Balls to, among others, Les Dawson, Muttley from Wacky Races, the bulldog in Tom & Jerry and a “sticky pud”.

More recently, he has moved on to insulting Cooper, who last year Letts derided as a “Play School presenter” displaying “no novelty or spontaneity. No flashes of humanity. Just a programmed product.”

Balls has yet to comment on Letts’s latest intervention, although in 2012 he said of the Mail and his obsessive tormentor: “I have to say I take him about as seriously as I take Roy of the Rovers. It’s entertainment. It’s a comic.”