He also does a bit of presenting on Good Morning Britain, and has produced several documentaries for the BBC, one on Donald Trump and another on the social care crisis – prompted by his experiences with his 83-year-old mother, who lives in a care home.

“She’s now had dementia for over 15 years,” he says. “A year ago they had a bad outbreak of Covid in the home and lots of people died. My mum tested positive but she didn’t have any symptoms. I think she’s healthier now than when she first went to the home three-and-a-half years ago.”

His dad, a zoologist, picked up the foodie bug during the pandemic and, Balls says, has started “cooking for the first time. And what has finally happened in the last few months is that my mum can come out of the home to have lunch with him, rather than him going to the home. It has a sense of normalcy and familiarity to it, which you don’t get if you go into a care home and have to wear PPE and sit around like you don’t belong.”

He is in talks to do more programmes with the BBC. When I ask if he would ever go back to politics he tells me that his answer is “probably not. There’s a new generation of parliamentarians in both parties, and maybe they should be allowed to get on with it. And in my own way, with my films about social care, I can show people things that I wouldn’t be able to show if I was still in Parliament. So maybe I’ve found a way to make a contribution that doesn’t require you to be elected.”

Punch and Judy politics

Our plates are replaced with coffees and teas. He says politics has always been confrontational, but that he thinks “it became more edgily aggressive once David Cameron became leader of the opposition.”

Balls doesn’t hold with that style. “I don’t think our politics has to be nasty and divisive. I think it’s fine to smile and to sometimes get on. I think when David Cameron said he stood for an end to Punch and Judy politics, I thought ‘that’s good’. And then he was probably more Punch and Judy in his politics than any prime minister I’ve seen up close, and I thought that was a pity.” Boris Johnson, he believes, has followed in this tradition.

But what about that macho culture under Blair and Brown? “I think in the period leading up to 1997, before we got into government, it was quite young and male. But that changed a lot once we were in.” There were certainly no drunken gatherings in state rooms during his time. “In the days when I was working in Downing Street, there was rather more social distancing than partying. But then that was the nature of the Blair-Brown relationship. 

“I think most people who have worked in politics find the partygate stuff pretty incomprehensible. In politics you have to spend the whole time asking yourself: is the way in which we are behaving something we could explain and justify if seen by the outside world? And every now and then people in their personal lives blow up, they behave in a reckless manner. But normally systems don’t behave recklessly. Systems are there to stop that happening.”

Balls thinks that the Treasury and the Bank of England did a “brilliant” job at the beginning of the pandemic. “The economic story is a good story,” he says. He doesn’t feel the need to paint the Tories as baddies – he can give compliments where they are due and thinks that consensus, broadly speaking, is a good thing, and there should be more of it.

“Politics has changed in that with social media you can attack the other side and strengthen the enthusiasm of your base by using language which is more aggressive and divisive. The kind of politics which says the other side aren’t only wrong but evil, that their motives are base. I think personally that is quite alienating for lots of people watching Prime Minister’s Questions.”

He says that Sir Keir Starmer is at his best “when he’s speaking to the country”, rather than to the party. Could Labour win the next election? “It’s a huge task for Labour to win because of the scale of the loss in 2019, and in particular because of what’s happened in Scotland. So I think it’s hard. But it’s possible.”

Balls is engaging company, and lights up when we are not talking about politics. He loves that in this new life he gets to spend more time with his children, and that he can be more open-minded and less cynical.

But he still believes that politics is the most important job in the world. “I think the only time I felt really gloomy in the last few weeks was when Tony Blair did an interview where he was talking about his family, and he said he wouldn’t want his children to go into politics.” The big blue eyes look truly dismayed. “I thought: ‘Tony, you can’t say that’. He went into politics because he believed he could change the world and he did some really important things. In every generation, society’s only work is to persuade the next generation that politics is a noble cause, and you should go and do it. Because if you don’t…”

He takes a gulp of his coffee. “Societies get the politicians they deserve. If you have a society where only the oligarchs get elected, or only the men, or the rich, or election is a route to self-aggrandisement, well that’s when democracies collapse. It may be that when you’ve seen politics up close and how brutal it is, that you decide it’s not for you. But to say you don’t want your kids to because it’s a bad thing to do these days, that’s really dangerous.”

The sausages may have gone cold, but the same cannot be said for Ed Balls’s passion.

Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food by Ed Balls publishes in paperback on March 17. To pre-order from Telegraph Books for £8.99, call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk