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Good news everyone: Ed Balls doesn’t hate the poor after all. Instead, the officials in his department merely think he does:

Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, whose department issued a statement branding the £7.45 London living wage “inflationary, artificial and unnecessary”, has blamed his officials for putting out the damning words without his permission.

[...]

Now we are told that this was a statement drafted by Treasury officials and that no minister – including Balls’s wife, Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary to the Treasury – saw it before it was issued.

Thank goodness for that. It turns out that Balls and Cooper aren’t bastards after all. It’s their officials, who are apparently so clueless as to what their respective bosses think, that they imagined the children’s minister and chief secretary to the Treasury would hate the idea of a living wage.

How did officials come to that conclusions – form that impression – then, if it was a complete fiction and everything? I suppose they must have considered Ed Ball’s time in the Treasury and that department’s misanthropic attitude towards the poor and thought they were being pretty accurate. How very silly of them.