Is Ed Balls's candour foolish or refreshing - or both?

The full text of Ed Ball's interview in the new edition of the New Statesman is now online.

The interviewer, GMTV's Gloria de Piero, spent a day with the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, during which she made a number of attempts to entrap him into admitting his ambitions for yet higher office.

He skirts around the issue of the Labour leadership, saying:

"I’m not going to say that I don’t want to be leader of the Labour Party."

But then they get onto the job which he is widely know to covet, and he finally admits:

"Would I like to be chancellor at some point in the future? Of course I would. I’d love it."

On the one hand, this admission is foolish, since his political opponents will now presumably taunt Alistair Darling by saying that his Cabinet colleague is after his job - as well as accusing Balls of seeing his current job merely as a staging post to something else.

But then he was (eventually) giving a straight answer to a straight question. And aren't we always demanding that our politicians be more honest?