Elfin Yvette has given her flat vowels a dab of polish
HAS Yvette Cooper given her accent a tweak? Shadow Home Secretary Cooper stood at the despatch box in the Queen’s Speech debate. This was a biggish moment for her, as she hopes to lead the Labour party.
Yvette as Labour leader? It would mean husband Ed (Balls) sitting demurely in the front row at party conferences, gazing in silent adoration. He could sashay up on stage afterwards and give her a kiss and we could all write about his fashion choices and his waistline.
Anyway, yesterday’s home-affairs section of the debate gave Miss Cooper a chance to show Labour MPs what she might be like in the House should she be chosen to succeed Ed Miliband. Ah, Miliband. What ancient history the Ed Mil’ years now seem.
Yet they did show us, among other things, that an Opposition Leader needs to be able to command the Commons Chamber. Poor Mr Miliband never did manage that and it undermined him.
Miss Cooper made a decent speech. It began with some humour and contained an almost poetical defence of the European Convention on Human Rights. Before we knew it, she was on to Winston Churchill, the Nuremberg trials, the liberation of Auschwitz, VE Day. Whoaa. All this without the Government even including human-rights reform in this year’s legislative timetable. The Left seems almost cross that this part of the Tory manifesto is not being implemented immediately.
The Convention, said Miss Cooper, elfin yet poised, was ‘the strongest bulwark against the hideous disregard for humanity that scarred Europe’. She has a habit of nodding her head to her words but it was less noticeable yesterday. Nor did she do her usual sad-eyes routine – a look of wounded wonder, girly tragedy.
Instead we had a crescendo, a deepening of tone, a lifting of lower jaw: ‘We will stand up for human rights, responsibility and respect for our common humanity!’
She had put effort into this speech, not just the writing (normal Yvette speeches do not contain words such as ‘bulwark’) but also the delivery. She varied pace and volume with the skill of a von Karajan or Rattle. And that accent, I swear, was ever so slightly different.
IT was less jagged in the vowels, less astringent, not quite Cockney but flattish in a south- east England commuter-belt way. The coming Labour election may officially be about the party’s leadership but it may also be about the north-south divide, a battle for the soul of the Labour movement between the forward-looking South and a northern Labour which bangs on about coal miners and the bedroom tax.
Labour must reconnect with middle-income voters south of Chester. Are senior Labour figures starting to realise that it has been sounding a mite too Mancunian/Scouse/Geordie in recent years? They projected an idea of northern England as some sort of impoverished, victimised Coronation Street set. It not only irked voters in the southern English shires but also allowed the Tories to paint a more optimistic notion of the North with their ‘powerhouse’.
Hence, perhaps, the subtly modulated Cooper accent yesterday. It sounded more grown-up, less plaintive. An improvement.
She did not quite conquer her opposite number, Theresa May. When Mrs May rose and asked Miss Cooper to name ‘the right level for net immigration’, we had a sound of whistling emptiness and Labour’s Keith Vaz had to come to Miss Cooper’s rescue.
Her peroration about how the Tories, with their Euroscepticism, were ‘turning our country inwards, making it a smaller, narrower, darker place’, deserved the groans and mockery it received from the handful of Conservatives who were in attendance. Yet with her teasing of Mrs May’s fraught relations with the new Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, Miss Cooper scored plenty of runs and there were grudging compliments to her not only from the SNP’s Angus MacNeil (Western Isles) but also the Tories’ Richard Fuller (Bedford). Were I a Labour MP, I might not have been quite converted but I would have been assured.