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It can't be easy being Yvette Cooper right now. An MP for a constituency far away from Westminster, a hugely important job as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, married to another Cabinet minister, Ed Balls, and the mother of three young children. And that's before there's a global financial crisis, a Bank of England rescue and she's asked to front for the Government on the scrapping of the 10p income tax band.
Oh, and to cap it all, her unpaid aide Angela Smith threatened to resign over the tax reform. Smith has been persuaded to stay. Towards other rebels, Cooper has made some concessions - a Treasury review into child poverty will include childless couples caught by the 10p abolition, and amendments could be made as early as the Pre-Budget Report and implemented in the next Budget.
Plus she is prepared to hold an inquiry into the impact of the dropping of the 10p rate, and that could lead to a further shift. To no avail. The Labour back-benchers have the bit between their teeth. Besides, this isn't about her at all but Gordon - and reminding him of core ideology.
Cooper is well-liked in the party. She's fresh and vivacious, good-looking too. She works hard and she's prepared to take on the toughest of assignments - her brief from Brown at the Treasury is to examine ways the Government can further save money while also being more effective. That is no easy task, even without Brown - the person, don't forget, who presided over public spending for 10 years - watching over you.
Personally, whenever she comes on the radio or television, I find myself reaching for the "off " button. There's something about her lecturing, humourless, patronising tone that makes me cringe. I remember, during the Northern Rock crisis, in one radio interview she ignored the point of each question, and gave her answers as if reading from a script. The result was that she sounded lacking in empathy - the public wanted to know one thing, and she was going to tell them quite another.
In this, she isn't alone. There's something that seems to happen to New Labour women when they reach the top. When put on the spot, they feel obliged to preach. Perhaps they hector their children the same way - possibly they view the rest us as infants too, so from time to time we all need a stiff talking-to and a session on the naughty step.
Yet I recall Cooper as a newspaper colleague as, yes, being serious but also as warm, friendly and open. Slim, with boyish, short hair, she had fair skin and, endearingly, she blushed easily.
This week, her complexion was reddening again as she argued the Government's corner on the 10p move. At one point, she said of the Conservative chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, who interrupted her, that he was "one of the few members on the Conservative Front Bench who was not a member of the Bullingdon Club, but that does not appear to have stopped him from engaging in student politics". It was cheap and hypocritical - Cooper is herself a product of Oxford University, home of the Bullingdon. I found this hard to square with Cooper the ex-colleague.
Somewhere along the line, she's hardened. To be fair, she's performing daily in a brutal arena, where she is expected to fight fire with fire. In her case as well, there is the fact that from the very moment she entered Westminster as the MP for Pontefract and Castleford in Yorkshire, she has been one half of New Labour's star couple, tipped for the very peak along with her husband. She has been spoken of as a future Prime Minister. Her solution to all the attention she has received - and at times it must be dreadful - has been to surround herself and her family in a protective cloak.
But some of her difficulties are of her own making. Cooper and Balls have been accused of exploiting a loophole to maximise their living expenses by declaring their home in Yorkshire (his constituency is alongside hers) as their main residence - a move that allows them to claim a higher amount in allowances - when they and their children live in Hackney in London during the week. Their retort is that their position as married MPs with children is unique, that they can hardly leave the children in Yorkshire. They regard Yorkshire as their home - the children were born there - and besides, they say, they don't collect as much as they're entitled to, and as other MPs do.
Cooper grew up in Hampshire, the daughter of Tony Cooper, a union chief, and June, a maths teacher. She went to a comprehensive where she was captain of hockey. She joined the Labour Party in 1987 when she was 18. From Oxford (her Who's Who entry proudly discloses her first in PPE), she went to Harvard on a Kennedy scholarship.
In 1992, while in America, she worked on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in Arkansas. When she came back to the UK, she studied for an MSc at the LSE. Perhaps, this is the difficulty about her public persona - that she has never held a proper job. Her life was been one of insulation, of academia, followed by politics. For a brief period, she was a journalist, but as a leader writer, someone who told readers what to think. In this, of course, she is not alone. The Government is littered with examples of those who wish to run the world yet have never been part of it (not least her husband, who is also Oxford, a Kennedy scholar at Harvard and a leader writer - in his case at the Financial Times).
Her experience is confined to the detached - to think-tanks and working parties, advisory councils and opinion pages. In 1993, there was a pause in her unruffled journey: she suffered ME. "I was off work for a year and could barely do more than watch television. I became a Richard and Judy fan and watched a lot of soaps."
When she returned to her post, she fell in with Balls. They shared an office on the third floor of Millbank - he worked for Brown and she was assisting Harriet Harman, then shadow chief secretary. Balls helped her recover from her ill-ness, imbuing her with the confidence to seek a Parliamentary seat. Pontefract and Castleford came up, and she played a blinder. Cooper worked her way round the key local members so that when it came to the selection night, they knew who she was. She also did her research so that she used the constituency's colloquial name, the "five towns".
The local paper was ecstatic: "Grown men were beaming with joy and one man was dancing in the street. She gave a barnstorming performance."
At their wedding soon afterwards, the tendency of the New Labour hierarchy to be with the people, without quite managing to be of the people, came to the fore. Balls and Cooper were married in a civil ceremony upstairs in the smart Cavendish Hotel in East-bourne. Cooper wore a velvet two-piece designed by Vivienne Westwood. She held a bunch of white roses - carefully chosen, to show her affinity to Yorkshire.
At the reception downstairs, the couple and their guests, who included Gordon Brown and other senior Labour figures, tucked into Italian salad or Thai curry or fish and chips. Drinks could be purchased at the bar. Entertainment ranged from a 16-piece band playing Glenn Miller, to singalong, to a bouncy castle for grown-ups, to footage of Balls' favourite Norwich City. When they came to settle their hotel bills, the guests found they'd been charged £9 a head on top of their rooms to help pay for the bash.
The Blairites were never entirely convinced by Cooper, partly because she was so closely identified with Balls, Brown's longtime confidant. But Blair did make her a minister. Since then, she has juggled the ministerial red box with parents' evenings and homework. Come Friday, without fail, she will head north to the constituency with the children on the train.
As with her wedding, there is an element of earnestness, of trying too hard, about her. There's a brusque "yes, yes, but" aspect to her. So on the Govern-ment's current predicament she won't be cowed. Yes, Northern Rock was a crisis, yes, the credit crunch is hurting and yes, the Tories have made inroads but, she says, there are lots of "reasons to be cheerful". We've got "low inflation, high employment, low interest rates and probably also low debt compared with other countries".
In Treasury, she is conducting audits of the Government's biggest spending areas, such as the NHS and road improvements. "We've go to go further in demonstrating value for money and delivering efficiency."
Brave words, and you could be forgiven for feeling we've been here before. But anyone who dares to query her and ask if this Government has ever demonstrated value for money or delivered efficiency can leave the classroom. Now.
