Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, is doing the rounds of Labour conference apologising for getting some things wrong on the economy while they were in power. He has also launched a vacuous and wrong slogan 'Building schools and hospitals did not create the deficit', by way of non-apology over the government's structural deficit.
Except that it did - and saddled the UK tax payer with expensive 'off book' PFI deals that transfer money out of public services and into the bottom lines of private construction companies for years to come. Estimates suggest that the tax payer will end up paying 10 times the value of the capital assets involved.
So when Balls asks people to take him and his party seriously on the economy I hope people remeber just how much of their money he wasted needlessly on PFI - among other failures such as IT.
And thanks to the BBC Politics Show archive you can still view the wonderful attack on Balls as 'a 27 year old researcher' by Michael Heseltine at the Tory conference in 1994.
Danny Alexander take note...
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