Author Topic: Happy Ed Balls day! (Read 1706 times)

Weird Tolkienish Figure · « **on:** April 29, 2016, 01:23:42 pm »

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LONDON — Every year on April 28, Twitter users, mostly in Britain, revel in what has come to be known as Ed Balls Day, when a joke about a politician’s tweet is celebrated in a frenzy on social media. Here is some background on the famous post, the parodies that surface every April and what Ed Balls is up to now.

What is Ed Balls Day?

It all started in 2011, when Ed Balls, then the finance chief for the opposition Labour Party, posted something unusual on Twitter. It was simply his name: “Ed Balls.”

On that day, one of Mr. Balls’s aides had encouraged him to search for his name on Twitter; instead, it went out as a tweet. People immediately started sharing the post, endearingly mocking the politician for tweeting his own name. Since then, every April 28 is what Britons refers to as Ed Balls Day. Fast-forward five years, and that single post has been retweeted over 66,000 times, and #EdBallsDay was a trending topic on Thursday.

Who is he?

Born in Norwich, England, in 1967, Edward Michael Balls grew up in Nottingham before attending Oxford to study economics and philosophy. He also attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. From 2011 to 2015, he was shadow chancellor, the opposition’s spokesman on financial and economic issues. During that time, he was also a member of Parliament, but he lost his seat in last year’s election.

How is the day observed?

Celebrated primarily in Britain, and mostly on Twitter, it often starts even before April 28, with people on Twitter counting the number of days until Ed Balls Day as if it were Christmas. When the day finally comes, users repost his original tweet, adding “Happy Ed Balls Day” or hashtags like #NeverForget.

Other politicians have been known to celebrate Ed Balls Day, although his wife, Yvette Cooper, who is also a lawmaker, almost forgot to do so last year.

Mr. Balls and Ms. Cooper have three children. Asked if his family celebrates the day, he said: “They roll their eyes at me regularly. This is just another reason to roll their eyes at me.”

Even companies like Domino’s Pizza or the betting shop Coral now take part.

On Thursday, as Twitter users started celebrating Mr. Balls, Google said that British searches for “Ed Balls” had risen over 2,500 percent.

Does Ed Balls celebrate his own day? Where is he now?

Yes, he does, especially last year, during the election campaign: He tweeted his famous post with the words “Here we go again” and a picture of himself and members of his campaign staff holding signs with his name. Over all, he tends to respond cheerfully to the pseudoholiday, sometimes with another joke about his name.

Today, Mr. Balls is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, which he joined in June.

“It’s as incomprehensible as the Internet and social media can get, but people enjoy it,” he said by telephone on Thursday. “I shrug my shoulders.”

Correction: April 28, 2016
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the tweet for which Ed Balls became known. It was from his account, but it was not his first tweet.