Yvette Cooper comes across as an island of calm in a government which appears to be losing its collective head. The Home Secretary entered Parliament as an elfin 28-year-old in 1997, during Tony Blair’s era of rigid control and message discipline. She is now one of the most senior members of an administration which appears to be tearing itself apart over freebie clothes and Chief of Staff Sue Gray’s divisive influence.
Has she – as the Starmers did at the hands of Labour’s Waheed Alli – ever received clothes paid for by a donor?
‘I had a shawl that was given to me on a visit,’ says Ms Cooper, striking a puritan contrast with the £16,000 of clothing received by the Prime Minister – before swiftly reciting the agreed line that ‘the important thing is that everything is declared according to the rules’.
Ms Cooper, who entered the Cabinet with husband Ed Balls after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, must be sucking her teeth in private over the maelstrom in No 10, which is starting to put even Mr Brown’s stapler-throwing efforts in the shade.
Publicly, she is of course studiously loyal over the feuding in Downing Street, which was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday and has been given rocket-boosters by the revelation that Ms Gray’s £170,000 salary exceeded that of Sir Keir.
‘I’ve worked really closely with Keir and with Sue since we came into government and that’s been really important and I think she is doing a great job,’ she says.
But they are all fighting like rats in a sack! It wasn’t like this under Blair, at least not at the start.
‘This is a much harder legacy I think that we’ve inherited from the Tories than it was in 1997,’ she says. ‘The strong partnerships that we’ve got right across the Cabinet are really important and really effective.’
Ms Cooper, speaking to the MoS ahead of the Labour party conference, has one of the most bulging in-trays in the Cabinet. Her speech is expected to include details of a new crackdown on street crime and familiar-sounding pledges to curb the endless flow of migrants crossing the Channel.
She admits that although some elements of the Government ‘feel very similar’ to her last time in power, ‘things happen faster nowadays’.
That was exemplified by the speed with which the summer riots swept across the country within weeks of the election win. She says – with the help of MI5 – they were determined ‘to crack down fast’ by accelerating prosecutions of the ringleaders.
As a result, many of the rioters received long custodial sentences, in contrast to the suspended term given to BBC presenter Huw Edwards last week for accessing sexual images of children.
Is that fair? ‘It’s not for me to comment on individual sentences,’ she says. ‘I think it’s clear that the policing and courts responded to make sure that there was a deterrent to prevent further disorder.
‘Separately, I think it’s really important that the whole country has to take much more seriously online child abuse which has been escalating as a worldwide challenge. We want much stronger action, including with social media companies, in terms of tackling the online sharing of images.’
Over the summer, she somehow managed to combine crisis management with an interrailing holiday with Ed, their children and another family – a total of ten people traversing Europe in Race Across the World style, with no protection officers.
‘We spent a lot of time checking in and so there were times in different places where I had to have Teams meetings with the department and so on so we were ready to return at any time if necessary,’ she says.
The couple, who have been married since 1998, were at the centre of their own ruckus on August 5 when Mr Balls interviewed his wife on the Good Morning Britain programme he co-presents. Ofcom received more than 16,000 complaints, but announced last week that it would not investigate.
Asked if she knew she would be ‘interrogated’ by her husband, she says: ‘Well, I did know he was on duty that day, I wasn’t thinking ‘I wonder where Ed is this morning’.’ But was she surprised he didn’t absent himself?
‘That was always a matter for Good Morning Britain. We do different jobs and just have to respond to the circumstances that come up. We were talking about really important issues, which were the events that were happening with the violent disorder and the riots on the streets.’
Like her Tory predecessors, Ms Cooper talks tough on the small boats. With Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda policy now junked, her newly appointed Border Security Commander Martin Hewitt has said that a viable ‘deterrent’ is needed to help to stem the flow. One option being explored is to adopt an Italian-style asylum claims processing system in Albania.
Arguing that the Tories ‘pursued gimmicks rather than grip’, she says the Government is investing £75 million in new technology and covert surveillance, 100 more investigators to go after the gangs and is increasing the number of migrant returns.
She will go to Italy next month to discuss the Albanian system. ‘One the things they are trying to do with the Italy/Albania arrangement is to use it as a fast-track
system,’ she says, ‘so that if people are arriving from countries with very low crime rates or predominantly safe countries, they are able to fast-track those decisions.’
Robert Jenrick, the front-runner in the Tory leadership contest, wrote in the Daily Mail on Friday that mass migration and ‘woke culture’ was putting England’s national identity at risk, a perception which has helped spur the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
Asked about his remarks, Ms Cooper, whose Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley constituency backed Brexit by more than two-thirds, strikes a patriotic tone which falls short of jingoism.
‘I think England is a really strong country. I feel very proud to be English even though I was born in Scotland. I think of myself very much as English and I feel very proud to be British as well.
‘Pontefract castle will often fly the St George’s flag and we have the Liquorice Fair every year in Pontefract. In communities across Britain there are all sorts of concerns people have about all kinds of issues and there are all sorts of issues where we need to see change but I also think we have fantastic history in a lot of our towns and cities across the country that we should be very proud of.’
Mr Balls leaves their London home before 4am to head to the studio, which must be annoying. But Ms Cooper says the former Education Secretary is skilled at creeping out. ‘He is not bad at being very quiet in the mornings. It’s not what I would have expected of him,’ she says, adding he had not exactly been ‘light on his feet’ when he appeared as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing.
She says she won’t be following in his clumpy footsteps – because he was an impossible act to follow.
‘I absolutely love Strictly but I don’t think anybody could ever match his Gangnam Style.’