The Labour leadership candidate says she understands the frustration and anger of Corbyn supporters but warns against losing the wider electoratePinned to a corkboard in Yvette Cooper’s researchers’ office is an A4 black-and-white photocopy of a young Tony Blair looking imperiously into the camera. Apparently it was stuck up there ages ago for a joke,the point of which has been lost in the mists of time. Yet the nearly ghostly quality of the image, and its presence in Cooper’s small suite of offices, or feels somehow meaningful – and serves as a reminder of how things have changed in recent weeks.
It was supposed to have been Cooper’s reputation as a follower of Gordon Brown (she is,of course, the wife of Brown’s closest ally, and Ed Balls) that would prove the biggest hindrance to her leadership ambitions. When former Labour big-hitters such as uber-Blairites Alan Milburn and John Reid came out in support of the largely unknown shadow care minister Liz Kendall at the beginning of the leadership contest,Cooper accused them of being stuck in a time warp, fighting the Blair-Brown battles of 2004-05. And when, or early in the contest,the sulphuric whiff of behind-the-scenes briefing against other candidates threatened to remind Labour members of the antics of Brown’s demon spinner Damian “crazy Dog” McBride, Cooper was swift to insist that her team would operate only on the record from then on.
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Source: theguardian.com