Ed Miliband should sack Ed Balls If Clegg goes, Danny Alexander, another force for stability, would surely lose some of his influence. Both would almost certainly be replaced by men and women who disliked the Tories, preferred Labour, and would want make the Coalition a purely businesslike arrangement, if not bring it to a quick end. All this could end up with an early general election, a point that has yet to be fully grasped at Westminster. Even if Mr Clegg hangs on, the Lib Dem critics of the Coalition have been strengthened. The crisis will not play itself out until the result of the Eastleigh by-election is known, and the Rennard business resolved. In the meantime, the problems at the heart of the Coalition have distracted attention from what, in strictly House of Commons terms, was by far the most telling event of the week. This was the dreadful showing by Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, in the House of Commons on Monday, when George Osborne was forced to come and explain himself following Britain's loss of its AAA status with the rating agency Moody's. In theory this should have been an open goal for Mr Balls. Mr Osborne is on record as having made a series of unwise comments concerning the AAA rating, and his determination to preserve it. Britain's downgrade was at the very least an embarrassment, at worst a humiliation, for the Chancellor. Mr Osborne, who looked queasy and nervous, showed every sign of knowing this when he arrived in the Chamber to confront Mr Balls. By contrast, the shadow chancellor seemed bellicose and confident. Yet when the session ended an hour later, Mr Osborne had got away with it and Mr Balls was out of sorts. The truth is that Mr Balls isn't any good as shadow chancellor. This is an open secret in the Labour Party (where discussions about his successor are ongoing) and also I suspect the Treasury, which may prefer not to draw attention to the shadow chancellor's weakness because they no longer think of him as much of a threat. Political journalists have also been aware of the Balls problem for some time. I think that we have failed to highlight it because we like the man. There is something splendidly human about his pugnacity, his sheer love of the game, his vulnerability and his passion. He is robust, engages in argument, gets up from the floor when he has been knocked down. It is particularly admirable that he has stayed in mainstream politics in the wake of Labour's 2010 defeat when so many of his former colleagues - James Purnell, Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn etc, etc - have walked away to make money. And yet, as shadow chancellor, he is a failure. Monday showed that he cannot damage George Osborne even if confronted with an easy target. There are various reasons for this, one of which is Mr Balls's total identification with the economics and politics of the Gordon Brown era. The basic reason why Britain is in such an economic mess is because Mr Brown, advised by Mr Balls, spent too much and fuelled a boom. We are coping with the resulting bust. There is no getting away from this. Nor is that all. Mr Balls is now intellectually bankrupt. When he became shadow chancellor in January 2011, he landed in the job demanding massive deficit financing in order to confront the recession, in contrast to the austerity promised (though not yet delivered) by Mr Osborne. These ideas had been expounded in a rather splendid speech given by Mr Balls to the financial wire service Bloomberg, in which he compared the financial crisis we confront today to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Ramsay MacDonald's National Government failed to adopt the Keynesian remedy of higher public spending. As shadow chancellor, Ed Balls has failed to sustain this interesting case. True, Labour from time to time demands that the pace of deficit reduction should be slower, or targeted in different areas. But Mr Balls has not seriously challenged the basic Coalition strategy. There has been no great collision of ideas. As a result he has nothing interesting to say, which is probably the reason he compensates with bombastic but ultimately meaningless Commons performances. The former chancellor Alistair Darling and David Miliband (who appears to have at last got over his long sulk at losing the Labour leadership to his younger brother) are being aired as replacements. Either would be an improvement, as would Yvette Cooper, Mr Balls's wife. Last weekend Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, wrote an article in which he urged Mr Balls to go one step further, retire from politics, and take up some other occupation. I hope that Mr Balls does not do that. He has much too much to offer, and there are all kinds of front-bench jobs at which he can excel. Mr Balls is a highly intelligent and self-aware man, and I am sure that he realises that he is in trouble. If he really wants Labour to win the next election, he can do Ed Miliband one last favour. He should not merely offer his resignation. Rather, he should allow his party leader to sack him as brutally as possible. By doing in his former mentor in this way, Mr Miliband would look strong and ruthless. Favourable comparisons would be made with Tony Blair, who always lacked the courage to sack Gordon Brown. And questions would be asked about why David Cameron has been unable to follow suit.