Yvette Cooper

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Yvette Cooper

Yvette Cooper.Portrait.jpg

Name Yvette Cooper (born 20 March, 1969)
Nicknames Ice Queen (the media), Ice Pixie, Pixie Queen (fandom)
Politics
Party Labour
Constituency Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (2010 - present)
Pontefract and Castleford (1997 - 2010)
Positions • Shadow Home Secretary (2011 - present)
• Shadow Foreign Secretary (2010 - 2011)
• Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (2009 - 2010)
• Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2008 - 2009)
Likes 70s Lego, growing vegetables, Doctor Who, dancing at conference, The Sound of Music
Dislikes Cutting funding for women's shelters
Friends Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Ed Miliband
Enemies ?
Relationships
Partners Ed Balls (married 1998)
Children Meriel “Ellie” Cooper (1999), Joel Cooper (2001), Maddy Cooper (2004)
Personal Attributes
Nationality English
Religion Agnostic
Sexuality Straight
Height 5' 7"
Eye Colour Blue
Handedness Right
Accent Southern with arbitrary vowels

She's truly tenacious, but nicer than she gets credit for. ~ an anonymous Tory opponent, quoted in the Guardian

Yvette Cooper is the Shadow Home Secretary and the MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford. She is standing for the Labour leadership and is currently in second (according to the Cooper campaign) or third (according to CLP nominations and reputable polls) place. She is married to former Shadow Chancellor and famous Twitter meme Ed Balls.

Life and Career[edit | edit source]

Early Life[edit | edit source]

To be fair the white socks were awful. But there was a principle of solidarity.~ Yvette, on the strike she led as a school prefect

Yvette, age 7

Yvette was born in Inverness, Scotland, the eldest of two children. Her father Tony Cooper was a senior trade union official who represented engineers and workers in the nuclear power industry, eventually rising to become General Secretary of Prospect and Chairman of the Electricity Supply Trades Union Council. Later he became a director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and served on the Government's Energy Advisory Panel during the New Labour era. Her mother June, the daughter of a Cumbrian miner, was a maths teacher. Baby Yvette was soon followed by little sister Nicola, and the family packed up and moved down to Hampshire.

There Yvette attended Eggar's School, a comprehensive school in Alton, and Alton College for sixth form. Her love of dance began early: she did tap dancing and ballet as a child, as well as acting in school plays. She also took piano, violin, clarinet and drum lessons, and was hopeless at all of them.

The family didn't discuss party politics at home, but her family history and her father's work as a trade union leader imbued Yvette with a political consciousness at an early age. She joined her dad on the People's March for Jobs when she was thirteen (she still has the little green badge), and when she was fifteen she found herself leading a strike of her own.

Yvette Cooper, militant teenage trade unionist

One of the prefects at her school had come in wearing white socks, in violation of the school uniform code, and was stripped of his badge. The other prefects felt that this punishment was not proportionate to the crime. Some didn't want to take action in defence of another kid's poor fashion choices, but Yvette stood up on a table and argued that there was a principle at stake. She convinced thirty of her fellow prefects to go on strike unless he was reinstated. The walkout lasted no longer than the lunch break, as management folded: the boy got his prefect’s badge back in return for a promise never to wear white socks again.

But it was Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson who really launched Yvette political career. As a little girl she had planned to be a tap dancer or an actress, but then the 1988 Budget came out. In her own words:

I remember so vividly coming home and finding my mum in tears.

It was because Nigel Lawson had cut pensions[1] and it would mean my Great Auntie Liz- who was like a grandma to us- would be hit.

Yvette's political inspiration, Auntie Liz

Auntie Liz was one of those amazing women. She was a single mum and looked after her niece as well because her husband died and then her sister died. She was like a matriarch in the community. She would deliver babies and she would lay out the bodies when people couldn’t afford the undertaker. She had done so much through her life and yet she was having her pension cut.

I felt a real sense of injustice that someone who had already managed on low income all through her life was being hit again.

I suppose at that point I thought, "Hang on, if you want to do something to support Auntie Liz it’s politics that needs to change". So I decided to go into politics.[2]

She joined the Labour Party that year and never looked back.

Yvette read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and got a first. She did a lot of student theatre and anti-apartheid campaigning. She overlapped at Oxford with Ed Miliband, but their only interaction occurred when she shouted at him for giving her her Oxford University Labour Club membership card too late for her to vote on some crucial issue. Ed was traumatised. Yvette has no memory of this meeting. She also overlapped with flouncy Blairite James Purnell, and they became friends.

She won a Kennedy Scholarship in 1991 to study at Harvard University. After returning to England she got her Master's at the London School of Economics.

Pre-political Career[edit | edit source]

Yvette's first job was driving a tractor, but she was not very good at it and quickly moved on to bigger and better things.

In 1994 she took a job as a research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE. The next year she became the chief economic correspondent for The Independent, a position she kept until she was elected to Parliament in 1997. Her colleagues say she was a perfectly competent journalist but they got the impression she was just parking herself there for a bit while she contemplated what to do next.

Early Political Career[edit | edit source]

I thought I'd have a go at getting selected, just to see whether I was any good at it. So it was a bit of a shock to actually be selected before the 1997 election.~ Yvette Cooper

After graduating from uni in 1990 Yvette became an economic policy researcher for Shadow Chancellor John Smith. She left to take up her Kennedy scholarship at Harvard and stayed in the US work in Arkansas on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Her campaign badge read: "I’m backing Hillary’s husband."

Yvette Cooper, Clinton staffer

When she returned to England after the election she resumed her work for John Smith, but in 1993 she developed ME and had to spend a year off work. As she began to recover she took a part-time job as a spad for Harriet Harman, then Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. She once again encountered Ed Miliband, now a fellow Harman spad, and they became flatmates. By the time the next general election drew near she was back on her feet and for the first time considering a career in frontline politics.

The old MP for the safe Labour seat of Pontefract and Castleford, former deputy speaker Geoffrey Lofthouse, had been shuffled out of the way with the offer of a peerage and a fair bit of New Labour arm-twisting to give some of the New Labour apparatchiki a run at his seat. Yvette decided to apply for selection. She claims it was just for practise and to see whether she was cut out to be an MP, but if so it was her third practice run: she'd already tried her hand in the safe seats of Wentworth and Warrington North.

Her experience paid off. She was up against a tough field including Hilary Benn, Blair's economic adviser Derek Scott and the leader of Kirklees Council, but she researched the seat intensively and sabotaged her rivals by supplying them with "helpful" information about the views of the constituency party.[3] At the selection meeting she left the podium and went into the crowd to take questions, a disarming performance that won their hearts and won Yvette the selection. With a Yorkshire mining constituency and the 1997 landslide behind her she sailed into Parliament with a 25,000 vote majority.

Parliamentary Career[edit | edit source]

Government[edit | edit source]

Unless we act now, by 2026 first-time buyers will find average house prices are ten times their salary. That could lead to real social inequality and injustice. Every part of the country needs more affordable homes - in the North and the South, in urban and rural communities.~ Housing Minister Yvette Cooper, while presiding over a catastrophic collapse in new housing starts

Yvette Cooper: too intense for Alan Milburn

As Harriet's old spad and a leading Brownite, Yvette was already on the inside track- an early article in The Sunday Times described her as "the dazzling star of the Blairite nomenklatura"[4]. She became a PUS in the Department of Health just two years after she entered Parliament and was given responsibility for the health side of rolling out Sure Start. It is the accomplishment she says she's proudest of from her time in government. Although/because Yvette was popular in her role, her boss, Blairite wankster Alan Milburn, knew that she was very ambitious and felt threatened by her. He insisted she be moved.

Tony took the opportunity to appease his whining minister during the reshuffle that followed Stephen Byers' resignation (he of the famous "September 11th is a good day to bury bad news" shitstorm) and shifted Yvette over to the Lord Chancellor's Office. This prompted a typical TBGB row, as both Yvette and Gordon felt the move was a demotion and an insult. Yvette got the call while on a holiday ferry and initially turned down the appointment. Gordon went over to Number 10 to shout at Tony while Tony's enforcers called Yvette and explained that turning down a ministerial post "was not a good thing for her to do". As a sweetener they told her she'd be in charge of a future euro referendum, if there was one, and she grudgingly accepted the offer she couldn't refuse.[5]

Yvette Cooper.4.jpg

After a year Gordon finally got her a promotion to a decent job as Housing Minister, first under Prezza and then in the Department for Communities and Local Government. There she presided over the refurbishment of the existing social housing stock and a catastrophic decline in new housebuilding in the UK. Although Yvette identified the housing crisis as early as 2007, it's unclear what if anything she did to fix it.

Yvette remained in post until 2008, when she was promoted to Chief Secretary to the Treasury just in time to watch Britain plunge into recession. She was the first woman ever to serve as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and with her promotion she and Ed Balls became the first married couple to serve together in the Cabinet.

In June of 2009 she got her own department when she was promoted to Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, but she had little time to make her mark before the general election sent her into Opposition.

Peter: So you insert the Tory into the Machine...

Yvette: Just out of curiosity, does it also take beardy socialists?

Peter: My dear Yvette! You can't possibly think I would have omitted that!

Opposition[edit | edit source]

When Gordon Brown resigned after the 2010 election defeat the Brownites were determined that a proper Brownite candidate, not namby-pamby conciliatory Blairite-loving Ed Miliband, should stand for the leadership. Ed Balls initially wanted it to be Yvette[6], but she thought it over and decided she wanted more time to spend with their young children than would be possible for the Leader of the Opposition. They decided he should stand instead, and she would stand in the next leadership election if Labour lost the next general election.

Yvette was made Shadow Foreign Secretary in Ed Miliband's first reshuffle, but she hadn't been in her post for six months when Alan Johnson resigned as Shadow Chancellor. Ed Balls was reshuffled to replace him, and she replaced Ed as Home Secretary shadowing Theresa May. The weird dynamics of Coalition, David Cameron's tendency to protect his ministers and his weak position within his own party gave Theresa a teflon impunity to the various scandals that occurred on her watch, and Yvette wasn't able to lay a finger on her. Nonetheless, she was a capable shadow minister and an effective attack dog. She repeatedly forced Theresa, or more frequently her body double, flak shield and general dogsbody James Brokenshire, to come to the House to answer for the Home Office's various failings, and raked them over the coals them for their incompetence.

Yvette Cooper.1.jpg

As Shadow Home Secretary Yvette moderated the authoritarian New Labour line on civil liberties. She called for a national conversation about data collection and the right to privacy and abandoned Labour's campaign for 42-day detention without trial. Although she continued to support control orders (a measure the Government wound up reintroducing after their weaker replacement proved ineffective) and the retention of DNA samples collected in criminal cases even if the suspects were never charged, the softened stance she adopted brought Labour into line with the Coalition on the authoritarian/libertarian axis.

Yvette maintained a laser-like focus on domestic violence and the threat abused women and children faced from government cuts to shelter funding. She also called for new legislation to guarantee victims of crime a minimum standard of service from the police and the criminal justice system. With Chris Bryant she developed a coherent Labour response to public concerns about immigration that focused on protecting wages and prosecuting exploitative employers rather than impossible promises to cut net migration numbers, which the party sadly underutilised in its campaigning. The Home Affairs section was actually one of the better parts of the 2015 Labour Manifesto, but it received no attention in the campaign or the subsequent leadership election and seems destined to be forgotten.

2015 Labour Leadership Bid[edit | edit source]

Yvette Cooper.3.jpg

On 14 May 2015 Yvette announced that she would run for the leadership of the Labour Party following Ed Miliband's resignation. Her leadership bid had been in the works since 2010. In light of this, it's frankly mystifying that no one yet knows what she stands for. Except for repeating "the high-tech jobs of the future" forty billion times her platform is a blank slate. She's somewhere to the right of Jeremy Corbyn and to the left of Liz Kendall, probably- beyond this, all is fog. Her strategy appears to be to say absolutely nothing and hope to come up the middle by offending the smallest number of people and raking in everyone's second preferences.

As of the close of CLP nominations on 31st July Yvette had secured 109, leaving her in third place just behind Andy Burnham with 111. However, once supporting nominations from MEPs and trade unions were added in, her total climbed to 121, putting her just ahead of Andy who had only 118. Her campaign immediately started broadcasting this bizarre statistic as if the votes of three individual MEPs represented a decisive lead over Andy amongst the membership.

On 12 September it was announced that Jeremy Corbyn had won the Labour leadership election. Yvette had come third with 17.0% (71,928) of the first preference votes[7]. Almost as soon as the results were announced, Yvette resigned from the frontbench and indicated that she would not serve in a Corbyn shadow Cabinet.

Full List of Appointments
• Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (11 October, 1999 - 28 May, 2002)
• Parliamentary Secretary to the Lord Chancellor (28 May, 2002 - 13 June, 2003)
• Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Regeneration and Regional Development (3 June, 2003 - 10 May, 2005)
• Minister of State for Housing and Planning (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) (10 May, 2005 - 5 May, 2006)
• Minister of State for Housing and Planning (Department of Communities and Local Government) (5 May, 2006 - 28 June, 2007)
• Minister of State for Housing (28 June, 2007 - 24 January, 2008)
• Chief Secretary to the Treasury (24 January, 2008 - 5 June, 2009)
• Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (5 June, 2009 - 6 May, 2010)
• Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (12 May, 2010 - 8 October, 2010)
• Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities (8 October, 2010 - 7 October, 2013)
• Shadow Foreign Secretary (8 October, 2010 - 20 January, 2011)
• Shadow Home Secretary (20 January, 2011 - 13 September 2015)

Personal Life[edit | edit source]

There's always that sort of morning chaos. I think the most stressful time in any parent's day is that period between 8:20 AM and 8:40 AM. It's just... shouting. You haven't got them ready, you haven't got yourself ready and then suddenly there's a discussion about PE kit, or swimming. Who knew it was swimming today? And Ed has taken to piano practising during that period. It's infuriating. So the shouting now includes shouting at the kids, shouting at myself and shouting at Ed because he is playing the piano and why is he not helping to find the swimming kit?~ Yvette Cooper on her home life

Proud mum

Yvette is married to former Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. The saga of their romance can be found in the Cooperballs article. They have three children, now in their early teens. All of them took Yvette's surname because Ed didn't want to saddle them with his. Family activities include barbecues, The Sound of Music themed holidays, and hating Tories together.

Although Ed cracked the two body problem by getting himself selected for a constituency next door to Yvette's, this still left them travelling back and forth from Yorkshire to London on a train with three small children twice a week. When the kids were small Yvette tried to make it home by story time every night, but with two Cabinet ministers in the household it made for a hectic family life. They were often forced to rely on Yvette's mum June up in Yorkshire and her sister Nicola down in London for emergency childcare. (Nicola is a leading hospital consultant; the idea that she had more spare time than the Cooperballs gives you some sense of how busy they were.)

Ed is the better cook so Yvette has delegated all the cooking to him, and now comes home every night to a nice hot meal.

ME[edit | edit source]

I hated every minute of it. But I would walk along the street and realise just how many other people were struggling just to walk. And I would see how easy it was for other people just to walk on by.~ Yvette Cooper

In January of 1993 Yvette got a flu and didn't recover. She was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that leaves people too exhausted to do simple tasks like walking down the street to buy a newspaper or making a cup of tea. Her father had experienced something similar when he was thirty, so she may have had a genetic propensity towards it. Yvette spent a year in bed, unable even to muster the energy to read a book.

Yvette Cooper.2.jpg

Yvette hated the whole experience: the inactivity, the boredom of being trapped in a room watching daytime television because she was incapable of doing anything more intellectually stimulating, and most of all the sense that she was wasting time. Although some people never recover, Yvette was fortunate: she began to improve after a year and was able to take a part-time job as Harriet's spad. After another year she resumed full-time work, although she remained unusually susceptible to illness for a while.

The experience gave her an empathy for people on incapacity benefits that is somewhat rare amongst New Labourites. To quote Yvette, "I’ve always believed in being responsible, in working hard. But there are times when you simply can’t, when things go wrong in your life. And you can’t work even when you’re desperate to. To talk about people being benefit scroungers or workshy shows no respect."

Appearance[edit | edit source]

A terrifying yet accurate caricature from The Guardian

Yvette is noted for her elfin features, prompting the fandom to dub her the "pixie queen" or "ice pixie". She's one of the few politicians who employs a variety of haircuts, all of which look good on her. No one is quite sure how she manages it.

Portrayal[edit | edit source]

In the Media[edit | edit source]

Yvette often comes off as robotic in her television interviews, leading the press to dub her the "ice queen". There have been attempts to analogise her to Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel, none of which have been particularly convincing. Back when Ed Balls was still around they were often portrayed as a Brownite power couple plotting to oust Ed Miliband together.

In Fanon[edit | edit source]

Yvette is one of the key members of the NextGen cast, along with her husband, Ed Miliband, David Miliband, and Andy Burnham.

The Meme[edit | edit source]

As Shadow Home Secretary under Ed Miliband, Yvette is an important Shadow Cabinet figure and features in most gen NextGen fic, as well as a number of ships.

Shipping[edit | edit source]

Perhaps due to the relative unpopularity of het and femmeslash in the fandom, none of Yvette's ships are juggernaut pairings, but she still enjoys an active sex life on the meme.

Along with her canon pairing of Cooperballs, Yvette appears frequently as part of the Cooperburnballs threesome. She is also shipped with her old flatmate Ed Miliband, who is often portrayed as having an unrequited crush on her.

She sometimes appears in a foeyay pairing with Theresa May.

The Roleplay[edit | edit source]

In the early days of the RP Yvette was part of a major plotline with Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, in which she discovered their unconsummated romance and all three of them had to work through the consequences.

References[edit | edit source]