Ed Balls: working for Gordon Brown was 'debilitating' Mr Balls has also claimed that working for Mr Brown was "debilitating" and confesses that at times he was overzealous in his criticism of Tony Blair. "Nobody is going to look back at any point in history and say that Gordon Brown was a great prime minister," he said in a magazine interview, adding that the leadership Mr Brown showed with Alistair Darling during the financial crisis was still of "monumental significance." Balls, who worked closely with Mr Brown for 16 years and was his closest lieutenant, said: "I spent a lot of time with somebody for whom not being the leader was the most important thing. It's unbelievably debilitating to your life, to your relationships, to everything. Gordon ended up seeing the difficulties of any situation rather than the opportunities. He allowed himself to be very hedged in. His problem was he stood on a platform of change without being really willing to set out what that meant. However, in a rare show of contrition, Mr Balls admits that at times he could have been more diplomatic when rejecting some of Tony Blair's ideas. Did I sometimes do that in a youthfully, exuberantly stupid way? Mea Culpa. But you know? People in life grow up. He denies frequently made accusations that he is a bully. "I don't think [my wife] Yvette [Cooper] would have put up with me if I were a male macho bully," he said. But Mr Balls did have biting words for George Osborne, the Chancellor, ahead of Wednesday's Budget. I think his problem is he's a Chancellor who doesn't really understand economics and he's a historian who has not really read his history. If he'd studies his history, he would know that the huge political mistake of economic policy over the past 100 years is to believe your own rhetoric and to stick doggedly to a course in the hope that something will turn up; that, if you say something is true, it will turn out to be.