Balls hits out at Clegg comments
One of Gordon Brown's closest allies hit out at Nick Clegg after the Liberal Democrat leader warned he could demand the Prime Minister's removal as the price of co-operation with Labour in a hung parliament.
Children's Secretary Ed Balls said Mr Clegg had no right to tell the British people who the leader of the country should be.
The row erupted as the latest crop of opinion polls suggested that the country remained on course for a hung parliament in the General Election on May 6, with the Tories unable to establish a decisive lead over their rivals.
The prospect that they may be unable to form a government on their own has caused alarm within the Conservative ranks. For the second time in a week the Tory high command has pulled a planned party election broadcast at the last minute to replace it with one concentrating on the dangers of a hung parliament.
But there is anger also in the Labour ranks after Mr Clegg made clear that he would be prepared to work with the party, even if it had slipped to third in the popular vote, provided it got rid of Mr Brown.
Mr Balls told BBC2's Newsnight "I don't think that it is for Nick Clegg to start telling the British people who the Prime Minister should be. Nick Clegg at the moment is giving the impression that he himself can decide who will be the prime minister of this country. That is decided by the British people in the ballot box. You cannot give the impression that politics is like a game of trumps where you can play your hand and bluff away. The hands have not yet been dealt."
The latest batch of polls painted a broadly consistent picture, with the Tories slightly ahead of the Lib Dems, and Labour trailing in third place.
ComRes for ITV News and The Independent was the closest with the Conservatives on 32%, the Lib Dems on 31% and Labour on 28%. ICM for The Guardian puts the Tories on 33%, the Lib Dems on 30% and Labour on 28%; YouGov for The Sun has the Tories on 33%, the Lib Dems on 29%, and Labour on 28%; while Opinium for the Daily Express puts the Tories on 34%, the Lib Dems on 28% and Labour on 25%.
Shadow chancellor George Osborne later denied Conservative warnings about a hung Parliament were a sign the party was rattled by its slump in the polls, which has seen the Tories fall from 45% last year to as little as 31% in the weeks before the election.
Mr Osborne told Radio LBC 97.3: "In the middle of parliaments, there is a big gap and when you get near the election it gets closer. That always happens. Increasingly, the choice in this election is between a Conservative victory with the power to get on with things from next Friday and a hung Parliament where no-one is in control and it is the oldest of old politics... with haggling over who gets what job and which party sits where, and I don't think that's what people want."
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