COOPER FITS THE BILL TO BE NEXT LABOUR LEADER

LABOUR MPs are beginning to wonder whether Yvette Cooper is a potential leader-in-waiting who could save their floundering party from obliteration.

The former Cabinet minister’s frontbench career looked over when she finished a miserable third in the 2015 leadership contest. Many of her colleagues were disappointed by the lacklustre campaign she ran in the race that was won by the hard-Left Jeremy Corbyn.

Now Ms Cooper is winning admiration on the Labour benches for her interventions in the Commons. At last Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, she was the only Labour MP who managed to fire an effective salvo at Theresa May over that morning’s announcement of the Budget U-turn. “Is that why they want to abolish spring Budgets – because they just keep ripping them up?” she asked.

Mr Corbyn’s performance, asking just one direct question, was so poor as to be mocked with hand gestures from the humiliated Chancellor Philip Hammond suggesting a gaping own-goal.

Ms Cooper’s campaigning on behalf of refugees could help attract the support of some of the party’s Left-wing grassroots members who are beginning to realise Mr Corbyn is not up to his job and is putting the party in dire peril.

Many Labourites are deeply embarrassed that the Tories have now twice chosen a female leader while the official opposition only allowed Harriet Harman and Margaret Beckett to hold the post as temporary stand-ins.

Ms Cooper’s appeal may also have been helped by the easing of public hostility towards her husband Ed Balls thanks to his antics in Strictly Come Dancing. His celebrity adventure has made it more difficult to cast the couple as bland Blairites.

Ms Cooper does not look like an election winner: she remains a vociferous opponent of Brexit and is an advocate of many failed policies of Labour’s past. But a growing number of Labour MPs are desperate for an experienced figure capable at least of holding the party together and save it from going out of business. Some suspect Ms Cooper could be the MP to fit the bill.