Yvette cooper

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

Both The Mail and The Sun are running on their front pages that Alan Johnson’s wife is allegedly having an affair with his bodyguard. There are, though, other rumours referenced in other papers. The Tory view this evening is that they now face a tactically harder fight but a strategically easier one. They fully expect Balls to snap at Osborne’s ankles more effectively than Johnson did. But they think that Balls’ previous on the economy and his oft-expressed views on a double dip and the Darling plan will help them overall. One thing worth noting this evening is that Liam Byrne’s appointment to shadow Iain Duncan-Smith shows that Ed Miliband

After the result, the spin. We got the first drafts of each party’s response to the Oldham by-election in the dark hours of this morning – but the picture is solidifying now that the sun has risen. What’s clear is that both Labour and the Lib Dems are having an easier time putting on a united front than the Tories. The Labour response was typified by Yvette Cooper’s appearance on the Today Programme earlier. She broadcast the message that her party would have broadcast whatever the result: that this is defining proof that the public doesn’t back the coalition and its economic policy. And as for the Lib Dems, they’re

You’ve probably heard about Alan Johnson’s latest slip-up yesterday. But it’s still worth highlighting the response made by a Labour spokesman – as Dizzy has – because it’s simply extraordinary. Here it is: “We have a Shadow Chancellor who lives in the real world. He knows the difference between a progresive and regressive tax. He knows what it takes to get on in the real world. That is more important than taking part in a Westminster quiz game.” Extraordinary that Labour should already have to make excuses on behalf of Johnson. But even more extraordinary that they should be made in this manner. The shadow chancellor errs, in quick succession,

Ok, so Ed Miliband’s one hundred day anniversary actually falls on Tuesday – but what’s a couple of days between bloggers? Besides, even with two days to go, it’s safe to say that his will be a peculiar century. By some scientific measures, Labour are doing alright; sucking up Lib Dem voters to push ahead of the Tories in opinion polls. But that belies what has been an unconvincing start from their new leader. Here’s my quick five-point guide to his bitter honeymoon: 1) What’s the economy, stupid? One of Miliband’s boldest moves to date was his appointment of Alan Johnson as shadow chancellor. Indeed, at the time, I suggested that it could be

Labour’s spin is less dexterous now that Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson have passed into night; but it can still artfully disguise politics as principle. Douglas Alexander is at in the Guardian, fanning the dull embers of George Osborne and IDS’ summer spat. He renews the offer of cross-party dialogue that he made on Andrew Marr last Sunday, before retreating, saying: ‘But beneath the talk of “we’re all in this together” (a phrase specifically recommended for repeated use by Republican pollster Frank Luntz), what the chancellor announced on welfare was largely a laundry list of cuts that penalise the vulnerable and the working poor. And in doing so he undermined

I wonder if Theresa May felt faintly apprehensive this morning. It must bad enough to awake and remember that you’re the Home Secretary, held responsible for every immigrant, every strike and every crime committed in Britain. Northern Ireland is more poisoned ministerial chalice, just. Now, she is being shadowed by Ed Balls, a ravening attack-dog liberated by the opposition. Balls has re-invented himself as a traditional Labour politician, casting himself as the champion of the working class. He says, accurately, that the poor are the victims of crime and the victims of unbridled immigration and social dislocation and his opposition will be ardently authoritarian. May will have to cut police

The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business. If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.  Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two

The list for the shadow Cabinet elections shows that no David Miliband supporter who was going to stand for the shadow Cabinet has decided not to run following Ed Miliband’s victory. It’ll be intriguing to see what the party balance of the shadow Cabinet is following these elections. There is an expectation that Yvette Cooper will top the poll now that David Miliband is not standing. David Miliband’s decision not to stand was as expected. As one fellow hack pointed out to me the other day, if David had stayed on the public would never have worked out which Miliband was which and the press would have constantly looked for