Ed Balls should take lead from East Anglian rival's style of chairmanship

There will never be a crisis at Ipswich unless the white wine runs out in the boardroom

Leighton Aspell, on Camping Ground (left), has market leaders Top Notch (centre) and Cole Harden (right) in his sights before yesterday’s Cheltenham victory (Getty Images Europe)

It is quite an achievement, to be fair, for a politician to be burdened by the surname Balls without prompting an automatic association with “What He Talks.” Ed, of that ilk, has always sooner evoked balls of another type. Not, strictly, the variety famously demanded by JP McManus of Charlie Swan at the Cheltenham Festival. (“Ride him,” the Irish gambler told his jockey, “with balls of steel.”) No, it’s all a little more basic with testy Ed.

Has any other politician, in recent years, felt less need to conceal the crude, unlovely undercarriage of the thrusting political ego? Try as he might, he couldn’t ever quite pull off the glib dissembling that is second nature to smoother operators. His smile would obtain a manic fixity, suggestive of some wooden soldier rising in the dead of night to let the pixies into the nursery. But just as you learn to mistrust the suave veneer of other politicians, so it became difficult – regardless of your opinions – not to admit a sneaking regard for someone so candidly himself; someone who drooled so helplessly, whenever he smelled fear.

Note the use of the past tense. Having lost his seat at the election, Balls appears intent on a transformation as dazzling as when Mr Portillo changed trains. He has not only begun a cookery column in The Spectator – with, I kid you not, a recipe for crab and Gruyère soufflé – but has now been appointed chairman of Norwich City. It is, you might say, a whole new Balls game.

He is not the first fallen idol of the left to seek rehabilitation in this way. David Miliband joined the board of his own boyhood club, Sunderland, after Labour began its acidic self-digestion by instead choosing his brother as leader – only to sidle away when his fellow directors hired Paolo Di Canio, purveyor of fascist salutes to the Rome derby. But whatever the possible dividends for Balls, he is evidently expected to assist his club in a metamorphosis of its own. With Delia Smith and Stephen Fry already on the board, Norwich seems to be attempting a calculated, populist disavowal of provinciality. Whoever next? Bruno Tonioli? Yanis Varoufakis?

They will not think a great deal of this kind of celebrity window dressing, down the road at Ipswich, for so long the last bastion of the old school. It was here, of course, that the great John Cobbold responded to pressure to sack his manager by saying: “There will never be a crisis at Ipswich unless the white wine runs out in the boardroom.”

That manager’s name was Bobby Robson, and he finished 18th in his first season and 19th in his second – before ultimately following Alf Ramsey from Portman Road to the national team. “The chairman drank a bottle of champagne when we won,” Robson would remember. “When we lost he drank two bottles and thought we’d won.” Cobbold’s brother and successor, Patrick, had a standard formula for people who buttonholed him at pubs and parties to tell him what was wrong with the team. “I just say: ‘Look, why don’t you eff orf?’”

True, the club now has an owner with a taste for a different kind of self-effacement in Marcus Evans or, to give his full name, Reclusive Millionaire Marcus Evans. Doubtless the Cobbolds would be eaten alive in the modern game, both brothers long dead by the time Simon Jordan arrived at Crystal Palace announcing: “I don’t go to football to drink Chardonnay in the boardroom with those tossers. I go to win games.” But the fact is that we owe our sense of any club’s character very much to its top brass. If it has sufficient history, like Leeds, we can shake our heads and sympathise with its fans over their current disenfranchisement. But there have always, even in the old days, been men like Robert Maxwell who could contaminate a club’s name for a generation.

Even a great club like Milan proves difficult to wish well, so long as it remains in the clutches of Silvio Berlusconi. And how much longer can pedigree sustain Newcastle, in neutral affections, under the singularly unappetising Mike Ashley?

If anything, there often seems to be a default presumption that owners today are as ignorant as they are rich. Countless “proper football people” were quick to lambast the sacking of two Nigels: Adkins from Southampton, in favour of some bloke called Pochettino; and Pearson from Leicester, replaced by a superannuated Italian who couldn’t even beat the Faroe Islands. Gone a bit quiet since then, haven’t they? Norwich, it must be said, seem to have taken a fairly inspired punt on their own choice of manager. But the club’s new chairman might nonetheless reflect that he could best serve its image, not with new Balls, but with a load of old Cobbolds.