Ed Balls will be Shadow Chancellor going into the next election – says Ed Miliband

So there’s been plenty of chatter today after a piece in The Sun(£) (backed up by those always off message and in the know “senior Labour sources”) suggesting that Ed Miliband might want to get rid of Ed Balls, and even that Balls might have been given nine months to save his job as Shadow Chancellor. Lets pretend for a minute that these sources are not someone tangentially involved in and around the Shadow cabinet team trying to puff themselves up, and are – in fact – someone senior. If so they should know better – but they’re also completely wrong.

Ed Balls is going nowhere.

Says who? Ed Miliband. Only last week this is what he was asked at a Q&A in the Independent, and this is how he responded:

As Tories continue to chip away at the credibility of Ed Balls as a future Chancellor, is it not now time to replace him with Alistair Darling, someone universally respected and thus feared by the Tories?

Frank Nield, Kenilworth

“No. All the noise the Tories make about Ed Balls shows how worried they are that he and the Labour Party are making the running on the cost-of-living crisis. With Ed Balls as shadow Chancellor going into the next election we will continue to set the agenda and show how working people will be better off with Labour.”

So that’s fairly unequivocal and clear then. Who do you believe – an anonymous source in The Sun? Or Ed Miliband. Welcome to Christmas silly season, where facts are thin on the ground…