Ed Balls’s decision not to contest the forthcoming Wakefield by-election for the Labour Party could yet be seen, in hindsight, as bad news for his Party.

Since unexpectedly losing his Normanton seat at the 2015 general election, the former shadow chancellor has carved out a successful media career. Long gone are the days when he was the bête noire of the Right. But rumours of a political comeback – the kind of story that political commentators dream about – turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.

Which is a pity, for Labour, if not for Balls. Keir Starmer’s front bench includes some worthy individuals but it is seriously lacking political heft, not to mention actual experience of government. Balls has both.

He also has judgment. It is he who, as chancellor Gordon Brown’s most senior adviser, is largely credited with Labour’s sensible policy to remain outside the euro after it was launched in 1999. And as Ed Miliband’s shadow chancellor in the run-up to the 2015 election, it was Balls who advised against scrapping the so-called non-dom tax status, which allows the likes of Akshata Murty, the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife, to avoid paying tax on some of her earnings in the UK.

“I think if you abolish the whole status then it probably ends up costing Britain money because there’ll be some people who will then leave the country, but I think we can be tougher and we should,” Balls said in an interview a matter of weeks before his leader announced the ban would be part of Labour’s manifesto anyway.

We may assume that it was Balls’s counsel that prevailed when Brown, as prime minister, was considering the problem in the last few months of his government. Changes contained in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 – one of the last pieces of legislation ever passed by a Labour government in this country – tightened the rules on non-dom status but didn’t scrap it altogether.

But that was then and this is now. Governments – even governments facing electoral judgment – tend to legislate according to what they are advised is sensible and practical, not by the whims of either the media or their activists. Oppositions, on the other hand, understandably wish to exploit whatever short-term difficulties are besieging the government of the day. Which is why the current shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has today recommitted her party to abolishing non-dom status: “If you make your home in Britain you should pay tax here on all of your income. That’s why Labour will abolish non-dom status,” she tweeted.

Politically the move makes sense, at least in the short term. The Government has had a rocky few weeks, and one of the reasons (not the main one, mind you) is the embarrassment suffered by Sunak as a result of his wife’s tax affairs, the effect of which has been a disastrous fall from grace among Conservative activists who are tasked with electing the next party leader.

Reeves’s announcement is gauged to keep that story in the headlines for just a bit longer, which is more important to Labour than the question of whether, in the cold light of day following the next election, chancellor Reeves actually wants to make this particular change. She would receive much advice – who knows? Perhaps from Balls himself – not to implement this particular change quite yet, especially if the nation’s balance books are as fragile as they currently are. An outflow of capital, while being a regular feature of incoming Labour governments in the ’60s and ’70s, is not something Reeves will want to encourage at the start of the next new dawn for her party.

Being seen to attack the rich – particularly the rich as represented by so senior a figure as the wife of the chancellor – makes good copy, and Labour knows it. In the mid-term of any government, no opposition ever lost ground by seeking to keep a bad news story going. 

But if that’s all Reeves’s policy is, she will have to be prepared to answer some difficult questions about it. Why, for example, did Gordon Brown, bolstered by a 60+ majority in parliament, not seek to ban non-dom status when he had the chance? Was it because he was a prisoner of the Right? Or did he perhaps understand international markets better than some of his critics?

Why did someone as experienced an economist as Balls have similar reservations? Usually when a politician is prepared to face down populist initiatives it’s because they genuinely believe such policies would be damaging. Reeves has yet to explain why Balls and Brown were wrong.

There’s one other, small point to make about Labour’s record on this: while the scrapping of non-dom status made it into the 2015 manifesto, it was absent from both of Corbyn’s in 2017 and 2019. Miliband might enjoy the approbation he will receive from the Left for daring to be more economically radical than the great socialist himself, but the chances are that in the chaotic and dysfunctional Labour Party of the last six years, it was simply a change that got lost on someone’s desk somewhere, probably under a discarded tofu burger wrapper.

Voters are still annoyed (but probably not surprised) by Murty’s tax arrangements, so Reeves’ manoeuvrings are understandable. But politics – especially political economics – should be about more than short-term popularity. That is necessary, of course, otherwise none of the opposition party’s policies end up being enacted in government. But when Labour is vulnerable on the question of being seen as a responsible, alternative government, perhaps it’s time to follow Tony Blair’s advice that it’s more important to be right than to be popular.

That’s something Ed Balls understood. As the national Twitter holiday of Ed Balls Day approaches this Thursday, let us bow our heads in regret at his decision to remain outside of the Commons.