I remember Jack Straw, who held the role in the first years of the Blair government, telling me that the jeopardy of one of the top positions in Cabinet was that “at any given time, some people in some corridors will be working away on a project you don’t know much about, and which could end your career”.
Those words must be hauntin Yvette Cooper, the “safe pair of hands” confronted with handling the unintended consequences of a report she commissioned in the aftermath of the riots which followed the grim killings of three young girls in Southport, and injuries to many others.
The conclusion, leaked to the Conservative-inclined Policy Exchange and then to The Times, proposed widening the definition of extremism beyond traditionally targeted groups: namely, radical Islamists promoting violence, and far-right groups with a clear ideology of violence and serious disruption through protests aligned to their cause.
By suggesting that combating extremism should be based “not on specific ideologies of concern but on behaviours and activity” – which included a wide rainbow coalition of misbehaviours – what was intended to be a quick recap on the drivers of extremism sprawled.
Cooper moved fast to quash the report: the Home Secretary knows when to take a short hit to her reputation, rather than defend a document which appeared to place the government at one end of the political spectrum in defining extremism and pick an unnecessary row with Reform and its acolytes.
But there is an uncomfortable aspect to this story which is a challenge to Cooper and Labour, namely that plenty of MPs, supporters and senior voices including those around the Cabinet table, have views along the lines the quashed report set out.
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Read MoreThe Prime Minister suggested as much when he responded in a heated moment to Elon Musk’s exploitation of the official handling of the cases of multiple Pakistani grooming gangs: the Prime Minister spoke of a narrative driven by people “jumping on the bandwagon” of far-right “fake” narratives.
Cooper’s way round this is the holding argument that resources need to be deployed most effectively – where the biggest problems are, without getting into more hot water on the report’s actual views. And, however disagreeable, that does not mean chasing manosphere troublemakers and fake news around the internet.
It is also a rare moment when we get a glimpse into a restrained political figure. Since I have known Cooper (which is many decades), she has been serious and attentive to detail. She has a reputation for a kind of earnestness which goes back to a story a mutual friend tells about encountering her in the common room at Balliol College, Oxford, a hovel strewn in her student days with old beer cans, Mars Bar wrappers and cigarette stubs.
Her career since, as chief secretary to the Treasury and work and pensions secretary, with a half-hearted run at the leadership in 2015, makes Cooper one of the most seasoned figures around Starmer, though in fact he hesitated in promoting her at first, wary of challenges to his then shaky leadership.
But the extremism report was a glaring mistake. It fed a view vocally espoused by Kemi Badenoch, and echoed among Tory and Reform sympathisers, that Whitehall is awash with left-leaning civil servants whose default setting stems from an unquestioned bias of their own, indulged by Labour out of ideological kinship.
They will say Labour fears unpopularity with the public, and the march of Reform or falling off of the Labour Party in parts of the country where anger is unassuaged by mere pragmatism.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast for Politico.
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