Yvette Cooper's Peculiar Fandom
Having just sacked the previous shadow home secretary for resembling a shadow more than a home secretary, whom from the firmament of dazzling stars on Labour's backbenches might you select for the position? Someone who flipped their home three times during the MPs' expenses crisis? Might be a bit risky what with parliamentary corruption in the news. How about someone who designed and implemented the hated Work Capability Assessment, which forced hundreds of thousands of physically disabled and mentally unwell people through a set of Mickey Mouse tests on pain of destitution? Or an MP who thinks the best way of countering Priti Patel's callous treatment of refugees is with rightwing posturing of her own? This baggage train worth of dead weight was but a mere trifle for Keir Starmer as he promoted your friend and mine, Yvette Cooper, to the position.
There are two reasons, from the point of view of the Labour leader and his satraps, why this is a genius move. Her barely concealed desire to be wretched to the wretched of the earth overcompensates for the imagined problem Labour has on immigration generally: that the party stands for open borders and free movement. A position it has never had, not even during the Jeremy Corbyn interlude. Bringing her own "we'll fight them on the beaches" stick to beat Patel will ensure the Tories can't credibly attack the party from the right. Because the Tories and the press never lie about their opponents. And number two, Starmer is keeping a potential enemy close. A meaty briefing like shadowing the home office is an authoritarian technocrat's fever dream. So many opportunities to look tough, pose with coppers, getting security briefings, there simply isn't time enough to arrange a leadership bid.
But this isn't the point of interest, what is is the person of Cooper herself. Born into the highest echelons of the labour aristocracy, her career trajectory was the tediously familiar Oxbridge to senior spad to safe Labour seat route, fitting a holiday in in print journalism along the way. In government, her two achievements were the aforementioned Work Capability Assessment and the expensive and ill-fated Home Information Packs. As shadow home secretary she barely laid a glove on Theresa May. With no accomplishments to her name save an ever-diminishing majority she's the very picture of mediocrity, which begs the question. Why do centrists and Labour rightwingers go gaga for her? Evidently, it's not the record. Nor is it an association with second referendumism - Cooper flirted with the anti-Corbyn Labour leavers at the time. What does it come down to? What powers her fandom?
Unfortunately, your scribe possesses insight because I backed her leadership campaign, even though it was a clapped out banger running on vapours. It was a compromise, a sense she was the least objectionable of the establishment candidates while being more likely to win a general election. After spending five years hanging around with right wing Labour, this melty conclusion was an abject lesson in social being conditioning consciousness. But for others of my acquaintance, it was partly because she was well connected - she was the Labour First choice, after all. Therefore career advantage and position entered the calculations for some. But for most it was a question of habitus, of looking the part. It wasn't that she was briefcase Labour through and through unsullied by struggle and upsetting the establishment, she was the avatar of the party's technocratic trend. That wing of would-be administrators interested in power for power's sake, not making our people's lives better. Truly a cult of the non-personality, she presents a vacancy in a suit ready to associate with the most pitiful political fantasies: photo opps in the Whitehouse, more women border guards and, borrowed from the Liberal Democrats, skills wallets. A sort of a manager's everywoman whose emptiness allows other aspirant politicians and hacks to either imagine themselves as her, or themselves as the sort of person she would listen to. She passes the dinner party test, in other words. It is, in fact, exactly the same reasoning employed by rightwingers who supported Keir Starmer from the off, and informs those poor, lost centrist souls desperately searching for the good Tory.
It means two things. This ridiculous trend will always stick around for as long as representative democracy elevates and flatters MPs as a cut above, pushing them toward accepting a managerial illusio for those who occupy or aspire to the position. And that they are always going to resist the mass involvement of our people in politics, a move that threatens to make them superfluous and indeed did give them the fright of their lives between 2015 and 2019 when something like that happened. Yvette Cooper is awful, just like her nominal boss, but once her star has dimmed again there will be one, two, many Yvette Coopers to fill her place. And with it a peculiarly unhinged yet vacuous fandom following.
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