Labour’s iron lady?

Yvette Cooper treated herself to a morning off from the campaign trail last weekend. It didn’t sound very relaxing, though: she and Ed Balls, her husband, went for a dip in the chilly waters of the North Sea at Sheringham Beach. A strange fondness for cold, sharp shocks is certainly an advantage in the senior ranks of the Labour party, for whom the pain of defeat has been compounded by the spectacle of seeing tens of thousands of new supporters paying £3 to vote for the left-wing radical Jeremy Corbyn.

Ms Cooper’s pitch to her party is simple: she is the only woman who can stop him. Corbyn now dominates the race. At hustings and interviews, the candidates are asked as much about their Jeremy Corbyn policies as they are about welfare, fracking and spending cuts. Cooper has been preparing for this contest for years, whereas until a few months ago, Corbyn had been planning to spend this summer on his allotment. Now bookmakers put his chances of winning at 85 per cent — and Yvette Cooper’s at 9 per cent.

She still seems rather cheery when we meet. She says there was a ‘hard’ first month when Labour mourned the loss of another election. ‘Now the party’s already got energy back, so it’s really fun going round, doing events and things.’

The energy, of course, has largely come from 66-year-old Corbyn. All of the other candidates are now defined by their thoughts on him, and Cooper has hers ready. ‘The things I strongly disagree with Jeremy on are about printing money, and also I think probably the internationalism as well, membership of the EU and membership of Nato.’