Balls fears Darling memoirs damage

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls has acknowledged that Alistair Darling's memoir of life in 11 Downing Street has handed the Conservatives an opportunity to divert attention from the economic difficulties facing the UK.
Mr Balls, accused in the book of being part of a parallel Treasury operation within the last government, was considered as a replacement for Mr Darling in 2009 by Gordon Brown.
In a sign that Labour expected the Conservatives to seize on the account, Mr Balls acknowledged there was "nothing better" for George Osborne than the possibility of revisiting the past.
Extracts from Mr Darling's Back From The Brink: 1,000 Days At No 11 have appeared on the Labour Uncut website and the book is set to be serialised in a newspaper at the weekend.
The website claims Mr Darling identifies Mr Balls and former business minister Baroness Vadera, key allies of former prime minister Mr Brown, as running an alternative Treasury unit. Mr Darling also confirms that Mr Brown tried to force him out of No 11 in 2009.
Mr Balls told BBC Radio 4 Mr Brown did not tell him what he planned and insisted that he made clear he wanted to stay in his job as children's secretary. He said: "I thought Alistair did a good job as chancellor in very difficult periods."
Asked about Mr Brown's plan, Mr Balls said: "He never told me that was what he was doing, but there's no doubt from what Alistair's saying and what everybody else has said, and the conversations that happened in that week, that that was the plan.
"I made it clear in that week to people in government and outside I thought that was the wrong plan. I thought changing the chancellor in 2009 was the wrong decision and I wanted to stay in the department as Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families."
In the latest extracts reported on Labour Uncut, Mr Darling was scathing about some of the senior figures at banks at the time of the crash, claiming former RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin "deserved to be a pariah" for refusing to give up his pension after taking the lender to the brink of collapse.
He described Sir Fred's attitude to the crisis as in keeping with someone "off to play a game of golf".