WHEN Ed Balls lost his seat on May 7, 2015 it was the most eloquent expression of Labour’s dysfunctional and internally divisive campaign. Shortly before the polls closed, Balls, then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, thought he had a fair chance of becoming the next occupant of No 11. A few hours later he and many of his best chums were toast. At 48, he was jobless and even his friends were talking about him as if he had lost his life and not just an election. Speaking Out, he insists, “is a fond farewell” to his career in politics. Henceforth, it seems, he will combine lecturing in universities, watching Norwich FC, baking cakes and “dancing” on prime-time television. Like Michael Portillo, he has morphed seamlessly from heavyweight politician into makeweight celebrity who, if ever he thinks of returning to Westminster, will struggle to be taken seriously.

His book, like so many of its ilk, is at times a painful read. Clichés abound, banalities proliferate, dread verbs such as “tasked” appear regularly. One day, he relates, while walking in St James’s Park he “literally slowed down ... to smell the flowers”. On the occasion when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met at Granita in Islington to decide who would be PM, we learn that polenta was “famously” on the menu. Meanwhile, members of the media who irritatingly try to reveal who among MPs is “backstabbing and score settling”, the better to inform the bemused public, are labelled “jackals”. It may perhaps be significant that Balls gives effusive thanks to “the wonderfully supportive” Ken Follett, one of Germany’s favourite novelists.

One had hoped for more from Balls, who before becoming a politician had worked for the Financial Times, where such lazy scribbling would have been ruthlessly blue-pencilled. He was 27 when he renounced journalism for politics, hitching himself to Gordon Brown’s coattails. It was a wise move and one that served him well. Indeed, the best parts of Speaking Out are when Brown appears, Heathcliff-like, to give the drama some much needed oomph. On one occasion, travelling by Concorde to an IMF meeting in Washington, the plane began to plummet alarmingly, falling from 55,000 feet to 25,000 feet in the space of seconds, whereupon Brown turned to his acolyte and said: “What do you think? Should we finish my speech?” Brown, Balls concludes, “was a fine companion when facing imminent death”.

Part of the problem with this book is its impressionist nature. It does not proceed chronologically but thematically. Chapters are given such bald headings as “Defeat”, “Friendship”, “Flowers”, “Markets”, “Spin” and “Mistakes”, of which the author, to his credit, concedes there were more than a few. Of Scotland – to fly the chauvinist flag for a moment – he has little to say, which is odd given he aspired to lead the Labour Party never mind the country. Of the independence referendum he offers this: “At the time, while I agreed with the politics [my italics] of the vow, I was deeply worried that devolution of income tax would ultimately lead to the collapse of the union by making the UK-wide Budget process unsustainable, and that we would ‘win the battle and lose the war’.”

What did Balls achieve in government? It is not a question easily answered even by himself. He credits Harold Wilson with founding the Open University, Nye Bevan for launching the NHS, Gordon Brown for making the Bank of England independent and Tony Blair for introducing the national minimum wage. All of them, it is worth pointing out, were Labour prime ministers. The Tories, it would appear, have done nothing in their history. Balls’s claim of a hallowed place in the annals rests – in his own estimation – on his part in preventing Britain from joining the single currency which, he opines, is “the most successful economic decision of the last 30 years”.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in these often cheesy 400-plus pages is that labelled “Identity”. Our membership of the European Union, he says, has always been a challenge to the British national character, integral to which is our apartness. Key to this was not joining the single currency. Had we done so we would have been umbilically attached to the rest of Europe. By not adopting the euro, concedes Balls, “we were not in the room”. One could argue, therefore, that by being part of the group who prevented us from doing so he helped create the conditions which led to the disastrous and divisive referendum earlier this year.

Whatever the long-term prospects of the euro and our now bit role in Europe, Balls’s part in it will be akin to that of a spectator at Carrow Road, home of his beloved football team, whose fortunes rise and fall like a soufflé. In Speaking Out he comes across as a regular bloke who, if he doesn’t have something nice to say about someone, refrains from saying anything at all. This does not make the pages turn quickly.

That he doesn’t rate Jeremy Corbyn – whom he name-checks in the same breath with Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen – is hardly headline news. That he got along pretty well with George Osborne and Michael Gove may have a few pointy-heads on the far left choking on their pale ales but who cares? And, as you might expect, he doesn’t have a good word to say about the duplicitous LibDems. What’s this I see? A new book by Nick Clegg! Yikes!

Speaking Out by Ed Balls is published by Hutchinson, priced £20