Yvette Cooper admits Labour has “not done government very well” in the last couple of years, and accused Keir Starmer’s No 10 of sidelining her during the launch of a key immigration policy when she was home secretary.
Speaking on the Political Currency podcast with the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne, Cooper highlighted some of the difficulties ministers faced with Starmer’s leadership, which she summarised as “bring me solutions, not problems”.
She said she had found a more collegiate style under Andy Burnham, and argued in favour of trying to form a national consensus around social care and reintroducing Sure Start-style children’s centres for young families under his leadership.
Contrasting the new prime minister with Starmer, the health secretary said there had been “a style of leading the government that maybe doesn’t necessarily work in politics” under the last administration.
As an example, she was critical of how she was in effect excluded from launching the immigration white paper in May 2025 while home secretary.
At the launch, which was fronted by Starmer, he spoke of introducing policies to deal with the risk that Britain could become an “island of strangers”, which Cooper later had to defend.
She told Osborne: “Keir wanted the immigration white paper. Actually, we did a lot of the work on it in the Home Office, and a whole set of plans to bring legal migration back under control, a whole set of reforms around illegal migration and so on.
“But then No 10 wanted Keir to announce it on his own and to front that up, and so I didn’t see what was going to be said or what the announcement was … that was the way that No 10 operated.
“It was like, well, you can sit in the front row of the launch, but actually the prime minister is going to launch it.”
She added: “I think Keir’s style of leadership was ‘bring me solutions, not problems’. And I’m not sure you can do that in politics … the thing you see with Andy is ‘hang on, bring me the problems. I want to talk to you about the problems. I want to engage. I want to hear about the problems, and I want us to work together in solving them.’”
Cooper contrasted Starmer’s desire to be presented with a set of options with Burnham’s more discursive approach on social care, saying he was “passionate about it” and wanted to talk about the problems and how to solve them.
“He wanted me to be part of the event, launching it, to be speaking at it, to be talking about it,” she said. “I think Keir’s style of leadership, which is very effective in other ways, actually, was … it just didn’t fit with that emotion that you need to drive change and involve people and include people in politics.”
During the podcast, Cooper also spoke about her ambition to build a consensus around a solution to the social care crisis, saying it was about “trying to create a sense that somebody’s going to have to solve this, and you know if it’s not this government, it’s going to have to be the next government, or we’re going to end up with a never-ending, growing crisis for our NHS because we’re not doing things to solve social care”.
She said she also wanted to build national agreement around the principles of Sure Start, a programme to help young families that was cut when Osborne was chancellor.
Telling Osborne she was “still angry” about his decision to cut funding for Sure Start children’s centres, she said: “I actually want to build that same national consensus on how we start our kids’ lives, so that no future government of whatever party would think, you know what, it’s OK to rip up Sure Start, because actually we establish this as something that’s so important in children’s lives.”
