Out on the stump in Castleford and Pontefract with Yvette Cooper, it’s plain to see why she is being spoken of as a potential Labour leader. She has an easy charm with the voters, but there is a steel blade in there somewhere. The daughter of a trade union leader (Tony, power station engineers) and granddaughter of a pit deputy at Haig colliery, the last mine in Cumbria, she has the spirit of the labour movement running through her veins. True, she originally wanted to be a tap dancer, but she seems to have mastered the complex steps of the political gavotte.
Being married to a front-running rival for the job is an obvious hurdle to Cooper’s advancement as the party’s first woman leader. It need not be insuperable. I well remember Arthur Scargill, then leader of the Yorkshire miners, being asked (over lunch in the Gray’s Inn Road boardroom of The Times, as it happens) if he would stand against Mick McGahey, the obvious favourite, for the presidency of the National Union of Mineworkers. “Would he stand against me?” was Scaggsie’s typically truculent reply.
A similar situation might well arise in the event of a post-election battle for the leadership. Would Ed Balls run against his wife, Yvette, if she stood a stronger chance of beating, say, David Miliband? At this stage of the game, Balls is obviously much better known, although not necessarily better placed for that. It has been put to me that Ed raises hackles as much he commands respect. And the notion that Yvette would have no backing in the trade union section is wrong. I know of support for her up ’ere in the highest echelons of Thigmoo, this great movement of ours.
Much would depend on timing, naturally. If Gordon Brown loses, he won’t go off in a huff overnight. Prising his nail-bitten fingers from the reins of power may be the problem, not the other way round. And the longer the interval between the general election and the leadership election, the stronger the claims of Yvette Cooper might become. There would be no point in trying to unseat Harriet Harman as deputy leader; she is too well embedded. It would only make sense to go for the top job. Who would support her? With the composition of the post-general election Parliamentary Labour Party so difficult to call, it’s impossible to gauge the backing of MPs, although with a strong female intake and the departure of many of the old lags, the current is running in her favour. And I venture to suggest that she would be a stronger woman candidate for leader than Harman or any other female MP. The union vote is less predictable, but I would put money on Unison, with its majority female membership, backing her. The constituencies would also find her an attractive proposition, politically speaking.
At just turned 41, time is on her side. Assuming that she has a good war in the election, Yvette Cooper would be worth a tenner in the leadership stakes.
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I had surmised that Gordon Brown would do something big on the day that Rodney Bickerstaffe turned 65, so as to divert public attention from this momentous event. And I wasn’t disappointed. He went to rather a lot of trouble, seeking an audience with the Queen and calling a general election, but if you’re going for an eclipse you may as well go for a total one.
Anyway, the former Unison leader qualified for his state pension on April 6, four years after retiring from a barnstorming presidency of the National Pensioners’ Convention to make way for someone older. Never could bide his time, that man. He now finds the pension is paid a month in arrears and he’ll therefore be unable to pick up the final instalment after he snuffs it. This is plainly a studied insult to the old union chief, but I don’t suppose even the architect of the national minimum wage can negotiate his way out of this one.
I did sing “Happy Birthday” to him down the mobile phone, a needlessly cruel act, and his official coming of old age prompted some thoughts on Labour and the treatment of pensioners. Despite his white hairs, Brown’s bid for the “grey vote” – in excess of 11 million and much more likely to turn out than the young ’uns – isn’t wholly convincing.
Restoring the link between pensions and earnings is an old promise and won’t happen until 2012. Ending the default retirement age of 65 is long overdue, but there will have to be legislation to give employment rights for those caught in the “transition trap” to 67 or 68. And the much-vaunted national care service is still mired in financial confusion.
It matters because researchers at De Montfort University predict that four out of 10 potential voters will be older than 55, while a “grey majority” will turn out in more than 300 constituencies, including 94 marginal seats in Britain. Sittingbourne and Sheppey in Kent, Clwyd West and Solihull are most at risk from the wrath of the elderly.
Michelle Mitchell, of the charity Age UK, which commissioned the research, says: “Older people are fed up with second-class services and we will support them to demand action from their local candidates on care, age discrimination, the NHS and pensions.” The agenda is never modest. Age UK, born of a merger of Help the Aged and Age Concern, may just be trying to establish its brand in the public imagination, but it has a point. In my experience, old folk are exceptionally difficult to satisfy. And, my, how they vote.
