Unlike Andy Gray and Richard Keys, it’s hard to keep Ed Balls off our television screens at the moment or off the radio and out of the newspapers for that matter, writes John Hipwood.

You won’t hear the shadow chancellor uttering anything that’s politically incorrect or sexist – not when he’s got to go home to have dinner with the shadow home secretary, his wife, Yvette Cooper.

But how about economically incorrect? If you want to hear someone who has no doubts about the way the economy should be run, Ed Balls is your man.

“I’m right. George Osborne is wrong,” is the mantra we keep hearing from the man who was Gordon Brown’s right hand man for years and who, way back in 1995, inspired a memorable line from Michael Heseltine.

After the then shadow chancellor had caused much head-scratching with his “neoclassical endogenous growth theory”, Lord Heseltine knew where to lay the blame. He told the Conservative Party conference: “So there you have it. The final proof. Labour’s brand new shining modernist economic dream. But it wasn’t Brown’s. It was Balls!”

Now in January 2011, the Tories are applying a similar description to Mr Balls’s theories about how to rescue the UK economy.

Speaking at the world economic summit in Davos, Mr Osborne said that Britain’s economy would be in turmoil if he were to go to the Commons today and announce a change of course.

The Chancellor appears to have the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, on his side. “The right course has been set, and it is important we maintain it,” Mr King said last week.

Mr Balls, however, is so sure that he is right, that he ventures to suggest that the Governor was speaking with forked tongue.

“I don’t think that Mervyn King, in his heart of hearts, really believes that crushing the economy in this way is the right way to get the economy moving,” the shadow chancellor said yesterday.

Like endogenous growth theory, his idea that the Governor of the Bank of England says one thing but believes another is just a little hard to swallow.

Since his appointment as shadow chancellor and against his own judgement, Mr Balls has already had to swallow Ed Miliband’s, Alistair Darling’s and Alan Johnson’s policy that Britain’s budget deficit should be halved over the next four years.

And in his BBC interview with Andrew Marr yesterday, he appeared to ditch another of his policies  imposing the 50p top rate of income tax not just on anyone earning £150,000 a year, but applying it to people on incomes above £100,000.

The shadow chancellor said that Labour would keep the threshold at £150,000 for “this parliament and probably into the next”, suggesting that Mr Miliband has won the argument on two major issues since the appointment of his old Treasury colleague and Labour leadership opponent.

Mr Balls is always certain in his own mind that he’s right, but maybe, just maybe, the power at the top of the Labour Party hasn’t shifted quite so far in his direction as some of us thought.

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Last week David Cameron uttered a few words in the House of Commons which were manna from heaven to a West Midlands MP who has spent several stressful years campaigning for a more thorough investigation into allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World.

Challenged by Labour MP Tom Watson, the Prime Minister said that the prosecuting authorities “should follow the evidence wherever it leads”, and plenty of evidence in the form of emails has now been handed to the Metropolitan Police by the News of the World.

Mr Watson says he has no evidence that his phone has ever been hacked, but he has had his bins raided and his garage broken into.

This was at a time when he was linked (entirely wrongly) with the scurrilous emails which earned Gordon Brown’s spin doctor, Damien McBride, the sack.

He still gets upset when discussing in detail the week-long attack by The Sun on his character, which finally ended when the News of the World stablemate apologised and Mr Watson was awarded damages.

Having quit the Labour government on two occasions, Mr Watson admits that he also thought about giving up politics altogether.

Those thoughts are now long gone, and he’s enjoying his role on the backbench Culture, Media and Sports Committee, which clearly offers new opportunities in researching the phone hacking saga.

Not that he’s convinced that the whole truth will ever come out, but he believes Mr Cameron’s statement in the Commons will lead to a much more thorough investigation by Scotland Yard. At the same time, he believes that it would all be better handled by a force other than the Met.

Today the West Bromwich East MP was due to release more information about allegations of a cover-up at the News of the World about phone hacking.

He hopes that eventually it will all lead to two outcomes. “Firstly, Rupert Murdoch needs to honour his commitment to clear out all the people involved in phone hacking.

“Secondly, that we get a truly independent replacement for the Press Complaints Commission.” Mr Watson stresses that he does not want state regulation of the press. We would all say “hear, hear!” to that.