Labour MP: I’m supporting Yvette Cooper because she’s a mother

How, as a seasoned politician, might you decide who to back in the party’s leadership contest? It might be that you’re swayed by the ministerial experience of one candidate, or perhaps the fierce commitment of another candidate to a policy that you hold very dear. Perhaps it’s because you’re from the same faction in the party, because you’ve been friends for years, or maybe it’s because, as a result of various twists of good fortune and circumstances not entirely under their control, they have children.

Apparently, that last is the primary reason that Helen Goodman, a Labour MP who served as a minister when her party was in government, selected Yvette Cooper as her star candidate for Labour leader. In a piece for the Huffington Post, the MP for Bishop Auckland writes that the most important thing to her is that she is a mother, and ‘that’s why I’m backing Yvette Cooper to be the next Leader of the Labour Party’.