Yvette cooper

This week’s Spectator cover has achieved a rare distinction: it’s going to be hung up on the wall chez Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Or at least that’s what the shadow chancellor told Sky’s Jon Craig when quizzed about it earlier. You can see the cover image itself, by Stephen Collins, to the left. And below are a few extracts from the article by Melissa Kite that it illustrates. ‘Can Cooper save the Labour party?’ it asks. ‘Is she Labour’s Iron Lady?’ And the answer… well, you’ll have to read the full thing for that. In the meantime, here are those extracts to whet your appetite: 1) Office space. ‘In

Ed Miliband’s poll ratings are going from bad to disastrous at the moment. Last week his YouGov approval rating dropped to its worst ever, with just 20 per cent of respondents saying he’s doing a good job, and 66 per cent saying he’s doing a bad one. And today they slip even further. Again 20 per cent say he’s doing ‘well’, but now 69 per cent say ‘badly’: And, most worryingly for the Labour leader, the number of Labour voters giving him the thumbs down (49 per cent) now outnumbers those giving him the thumps up (46 per cent). That’s compared to the 95 per cent of Tories who think

There was a fun game we used to play during Gordon Brown’s premiership: counting the number of ‘buck up, or we kick you out’ ultimatums that Labour MPs delivered to their leader. There were, suffice to say, a lot of them. And tallying them up illustrated two things: the constant, sapping pressure that the Brown leadership was under, and Labour’s persistent inability to actually finish him off. I mention it now because of this story in today’s Mail on Sunday. It collects the increasingly public criticism of Ed Miliband by his own MPs, including Graham Stringer’s warning that ‘Ed has got to get a grip and turn it around before

Unless one of Ed Miliband’s New Year’s resolutions was to ignore absolutely everything going on around him, I expect the Labour leader will be in a particularly glum mood this morning. And it’s not just that Maurice Glasman article — which has inspired the headline ‘Miliband’s former guru says he has “no strategy”’ on the front of today’s Guardian — either. It’s the, erm, questionable tweets from one of Miliband’s shadow ministerial team. It’s the LabourList poll that finds scant support, and much disapproval, for his leadership. It’s that John Rentoul column suggesting Yvette Cooper for the throne. It’s the Tory minister who said to Iain Martin that ‘Keeping Ed

Yvette Cooper says no to elected police commissioners. The Shadow Home Secretary gave her speech to the Labour conference this morning and, in addition to launching an independent review into policing (which has been welcomed by senior police officers), she defined her opposition to the government’s flagship police reform.  Britain can ill afford the £100 million pounds cost of elected commissioners and the reform threatens to politicise the police by concentrating power in a single person without sufficient checks and balances. From the applause in the hall, you’d have thought that the whole party was behind her. But not every delegate agrees. At a fringe meeting on Monday night, Hazel Blears and Labour List

Andy Coulson was right to worry about the coalition’s law and order policies: Labour is trying to outflank the government from the right. Sadiq Khan and Yvette Cooper have cut assured figures at fringe events at this year’s conference, sensing that the government’s cuts to the law and order budget will imperil one of Labour’s positive legacies: substantially reducing reported crime (by 43 per cent according to Sadiq Khan) between 1997 and 2010. A strange atmosphere pervades the law and order fringe: the name ‘Tony Blair’ is spoken of with something approaching respect and it is met with scattered applause. Blair’s memory is profane to this incarnation of the Labour

The sense of unreality that hangs over party conference seems particularly heightened this year. As events outside roll on at a dramatic pace, the conferences try to proceed as normal. A new law on stalking may be necessary but it is small beer compared to the economic crisis gripping the Western world at the moment. Ed Miliband’s challenge in the next few days is two-fold. First, he has to work to restore Labour’s economic credibility—something that will be made even harder by today’s allegations about the role of his shadow Chancellor in the last government. Second, he has to show that the party gets the seriousness of this moment. Miliband,

What an intriguing interview Yvette Cooper gave to Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan show this morning — and not just because she was standing, ruffled and incongruous, in a field somewhere. I was live-tweeting proceedings here, and there was much to anticipate even before she appeared. On top of today’s stories about housing benefit, social care and immigration, the shadow home secretary would also have to deal with the comments made by Lord Goldsmith during the show’s newspaper review. “It’s not clear what Ed Miliband stands for,” said Goldsmith, to cheers from the Tory press team. “I don’t think the rifts in the party have been healed.” But, in the end, it

Blimey. That was a weird one. PMQs was trundling merrily away when the house was suddenly engulfed in a whirlwind of insults and accusations. Even now the row rumbles on across the blogosphere. Cameron arrived at PMQs looking genial and well-sunned. Quite a contrast with his sallow-faced opponent. Perhaps Ed Miliband’s bookish ways have kept him in the reading-room during the heat-wave while Cameron was roaming his herbaceous borders uprooting dandelions and other troublesome yellow-heads. The session began with the usual blend of opportunism and hypocrisy. Miliband demanded to know why economic growth has flat-lined in the last six months. Cameron lighted on a more favourable set of figures –

Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on.   Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, wrote earlier this year about how she worried about the psychological effect on her children of people verbally assaulting her husband in front of them. During the Labour leadership contest, Ed Balls, for all his faults, spoke movingly about his concern over how he would protect his kids from what was

Ed Balls gets personal in his interview with the Times (£) today, but not in the way you might expect. For most of the piece he dwells on what the paper calls his “hidden vulnerability” – the effort to contain his stammer. And from there on, the politics seems a touch softer than usual. There are surprisingly few overt attacks on his opponents, and those that make the cut are considerably less violent that we’re used too. Which isn’t to say that the interview lacks politics. No sirree. Here’s a ten-point selection of some of the political highlights (so to speak), with my added comments:      1) Doubling back

Like husband, like wife. Yvette Cooper has begun shadowing Theresa May where Ed Balls stopped: by lacerating Nick Clegg’s naïveté in believing that control orders should be abolished. There is a faint note of animus in her politicking too. ‘National security,’ she said, ‘should not be about keeping Nick Clegg safe in his job.’ The government invited Cooper’s charge with its own crass political calculation. Spinning the new measures as a Liberal Democrat victory could only elicit that response from an opposition that is intent on exploiting the government’s broad weakness on law and order. In fact, as Lord West has remarked, the government has not even come close to