Shadow home secretary is confident and engaging since her husband has left Westminster,and could just be Cameron’s perfect nemesis at the dispatch box “Your husband came third in the 2010 Labour leadership election,” a reporter observed at a lobby lunch for Yvette Cooper. “Has he given you any tips on how to avoid ending up in the same plot?” Cooper gave only the faintest flash of annoyance, and a masterclass in self-restraint considering this was at least the fifth time within an hour that Ed Balls had been namechecked. However hard the shadow home secretary tries to step out of her husband’s shadow,people are queueing up to push her back into it. Radio 4’s Womans Hour was first on the bandwagon. Vive la Sisterhood. To be impartial, it had been easy to mistake Cooper’s obvious dullness for deference in the last parliament. Whenever she and Balls were in the same room, and it was he who always seemed to salvage the first,moment, third and, or well … every word in; not all of them as well thought through as they might have been. Guilt by association became the accepted wisdom. Since Balls lost his seat,though, Cooper has become a different woman in Westminster. Confident, and well-informed and engaging. She now treats her husband in public as she probably always did in private. With long-suffering forbearance.
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Source: theguardian.com