Cooper takes on the coalition from the right

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.”

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But, in the end, it wasn’t Cooper’s defence of Miliband that caught the ear — even though she took her leader’s approach of robotically mouthing the same line over and over (in this case, “Ed Miliband is doing a good job”).