Johnson out, Balls in. Everyone’s a winner?

Drinks all round, it seems. Labour gets its bruising economic brain Ed Balls in the Shadow Chancellor brief. He will attack relentlessly and with authority. Yvette Cooper, who was struggling in the Foreign brief now gets to shadow the Home Office meaning Douglas Alexander gets the Foreign Office job – something he is eminently suited to as a former International Development Secretary.

And Alan Johnson, who nobody (least of all himself) regarded as an economic genius, is jettisoned without having to be sacked, which would have only annoyed the last few Blairites in the parliamentary party for whom the former postman carried the dying flame of standing to the right of Ed Miliband. The top team is largely unified, former Brown acolytes and have worked together closely for years. That’s one way of looking at it.

But drinks all round at Conservative HQ too it seems. The man they have long blamed for Gordon Brown’s economic strategy, because he was Gordon Brown’s closest and most trusted advisor, comes into the front line. The man who stood to the left of both the last Labour government, and his leadership contest rival Ed Miliband, on the deficit; the man who still wants to pay off less of the deficit than Alistair Darling wanted to.

Tory strategists will be rubbing their hands with glee, and digging out the old Balls quotes. Conservative supporters in the media will run endless stories about Ed Balls’ leadership ambitions, speculating every time Ed Miliband is being criticised that a Balls coup is never far away.

The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere inbetween. Ed Balls will be a more formidable opponent for George Osborne than Alan Johnson ever could have been. But he will also always hold an alternative base of power and thinking in the Labour Party – and even if he never plots himself others will always speculate or plot on his behalf.

He may disagree with Ed Miliband, and he will not easily be told what to  do. While Labour conducts its policy review, and effectively has a policy vacuum over the next two years, Ed Balls will have a much more powerful position from which to fill it with his own ideas. And he is always full of them. That might work to Labour’s and Ed Miliband’s great advantage – or it might not. Politics just got a much needed injection of excitement.