The crowds passing through Westminster on Wednesday evening would not have been too surprised to encounter one of the political village's most famous faces, with its trademark thick black spectacles and the lights of the camera crew bouncing off his shiny dome. 
 
 What might have caused alarm, however, was that the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson was in the process of violently stamping on a placard he has just wrested from the hands of anti-war activist. When challenged over this most partial of activities, which was unfortunately captured on camera and uploaded to the internet yesterday, Mr Robinson said he was "not even remotely ashamed". 
 
 Those who watched the BBC's Six O'Clock News may have witnessed the irritation which caused the usually mild mannered correspondent to engage in this moment of rage: the placard wielder had been continually interrupting his broadcast. In the footage Mr Robinson is shown trying to pull apart the sign – which read "Cut the war not the poor" – before stamping on it, while a protester shouts: "You should be ashamed of yourself, mate." 
 
 Confronted after the incident by the camera-wielding activist, Mr Robinson remarked: "I'm not remotely ashamed of myself." But a posting on his blog yesterday evening revealed he has since softened his stance. 
 
 "I have a confession," he wrote. "I grabbed the sign and ripped it up – apparently you can watch video of my sign rage in full glorious technicolour on the web. I lost my temper and I regret that." ||||| Were you up for that Ed Balls moment - the symbol of Labour's crushing electoral defeat, the trigger for wild Tory celebrations and Labour despair? 
 
 In his first interview since that moment two weeks ago, the man who thought he was about to be chancellor told me about his "sense of loss" after his party's failure and a personal defeat which he describes as "a symbol of the vibrancy of our democracy". 
 
 Ed Balls was in reflective mood when we spoke - looking back at what he'd achieved as much as forward to what might be next. 
 
 "I think one of the really important things in life is to think about what you've done rather than fixate on what you might not have done," he said. 
 
 "So in those 20 years, I helped keep us out of the euro, I helped Britain to have an independent Bank of England, to raise education leaving age to 18, Sure Start, the national minimum wage, changing the health service - these are all good things.
– Mild-mannered BBC political editor Nick Robinson was transformed into a ball of rage by an anti-war sign being waved in the background as he broadcast from Westminster. Robinson delivered his broadcast calmly, then turned around, grabbed the sign from the protester, tried to rip it apart, and stamped on it, the Independent reports. Robinson later wrote on his BBC blog that he regretted losing his temper and erupting in "sign rage." However, he wrote, "as I explained afterward to the protesters who disrupted my broadcast, there are many opportunities to debate whether the troops should be out of Afghanistan without the need to stick a sign on a long pole and wave it in front of a camera."