“Be careful what you wish for” might be the motto sewn onto the garb of all home secretaries.
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”.
He was referring to the nebulous mix of thousands of officials, advisers, special project workers and IT contracts – the Home Office currently employs 43,000 people – in a Whitehall node that covers some of the most sensitive areas of government, from immigration and asylum to crime, policing and terror prevention.
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.
Cooper’s controlled demeanour and ability to absorb large quantities of information have so far preserved her from exposure to firefights under Keir Starmer. Yet she has now had to disown the sweeping findings of a report she herself commissioned – having had the final say over who drew it up.
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.
What came back must have added grey hair to Cooper’s neatly-coiffed head – the language sounds, as one despairing MP put it, “like they got the most woke sociology grad they could find to draw it up”.
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.
It turned into a long “and another thing” list of opinions and beliefs – though the report also mentioned left-wing and environmental extremism, it was not that hard to see which political foes were being pointed at here. It was, to use the technical term, an awful lot of too much, all at once.
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.
The former soldier on her team, security minister Dan Jarvis, was hastily sent forth to ram home that the Starmer Government’s focus needs to be squarely on Islamist extremism, in the wake of the Prevent programme’s failure to forestall Axel Rudakubana’s descent from oddball to severe public threat, and the most serious disruptions and aggression of far-right groups.
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.
They do believe there are many forms of extremism – not just two poles of it. And they do believe that in many areas the debate is being driven rightwards at dangerous speed. The tension lies in deciding what matters most, and how hard to clamp down on it.
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So in essence, Cooper is ruling many ideas and explanations out of this report which a lot of voices on the left of centre share. This is a bit of a theme with Starmerism as a whole: a gap between what is convenient to say and more complex underlying attitudes.
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.
She has enough trouble with the wavering “non-hate-crime” borderline areas where police are confused as to whether their job is to step in and issue advice or cautions, or to stay well out of raucous arguments between private citizens.
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.
A fellow student slouched in front of the television fished an apple out of his rucksack. “Have you washed that?” she enquired, to guffaws of less health-attentive students.
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.
A “chief prosecutor” style in the Home Affairs Select Committee pushed her to the fore again. Today, on matters like extremism, borders and policing failures, no one could sensibly accuse her of allying with the more soft-hearted end of her party on social issues. Her instinct is to sound sombre and issue tough guidance. Pragmatism has become her North Star.
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.
The person or people who penned the report can surely expect a less exciting set of projects in future. But the bigger aspect which will nag at Cooper and No 10 is that a lot of people close to Labour will see in the report’s definitions of extremism a lot that they agree with, and think the Government is fudging bigger arguments about the many feeders of more extreme and divisive views.
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.
Lack of resources is a short answer to a much larger question: what did Cooper really make of the arguments in the fated report? On that, expect silence.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast for Politico.
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