Starmer pressured to punish Yvette Cooper for not supporting Labour’s ‘child abusers escape from prison’ ad on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
- Ms Cooper is accused of stabbing the party’s campaign team in the back
- Last week it emerged that she had not been consulted about the Twitter attack ad
Sir Keir Starmer is under pressure to punish Yvette Cooper for not supporting Labour’s ‘child abusers escape from prison’ advertisement on Rishi Sunak.
The Labor leader is being urged to demote the Shadow Home Secretary for allegedly stabbing the party’s campaign team in the back by distancing himself from the controversial strategy.
The colleagues were so angry with Ms Cooper that a Labor veteran privately predicted last night ‘in the long run I don’t think she will survive in the job’. He added: “People who were skeptical of or supported the campaign universally condemn Yvette for doing that.”
The row broke out after it emerged last week that Ms Cooper had not been consulted or informed about the party’s Twitter attack.
The ad suggested that the Prime Minister did not want adults convicted of child sexual abuse to be imprisoned.
In the photo: Yvette Cooper (photo file). The Labor leader is urged to demote the Shadow Home Secretary for allegedly stabbing the party’s campaign team in the back by distancing himself from the controversial strategy
The much-criticized tweet – part of a social media blitz against the Tories – has been hailed as a huge success by Labor Party executives.
It has been viewed more than 20 million times despite being labeled “gutter politics” by critics and ex-Secretary of the Interior David Blunkett saying, “My party is better than this.”
Ms Cooper later retweeted an article by Sir Keir in the Daily Mail last Monday, saying he supported “every word Labor has said” on crime.
However, the Labor veteran who criticized her said that regardless of Ms Cooper’s personal opinion of the ad, she or her office should not have said she was not informed about it in advance. He said, “Coincidentally, it wasn’t her Home Affairs letter, so she wouldn’t be consulted. What you don’t do is wait for your troops to engage in hand-to-hand combat and then stab them in the back.”
In the photo: Sir Keir Starmer (photo file). The row broke out after it emerged last week that Ms Cooper had not been consulted or informed about the party’s Twitter attack
He also accused her of being weak on immigration, saying she preferred to “talk to the party members, not the voters.”
That’s because Ms Cooper, who was unsuccessfully Labor leader in 2015, “thinks she’s joining in with a shout” and “isn’t trying to alienate the membership.”
Questions were also raised as to why Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting did not retweet the controversial ad.
But Mr Streeting tells The Mail on Sunday today that he was ‘on holiday’ and ‘fully supported’ the campaign. Ms Cooper was approached for comment.
