When Yvette Cooper got her big break in Government as a junior health minister, her first child was only six months old. Worried about juggling the job and a baby, she confided in a senior official that she didn’t think she could do it.
‘She said, “You have to have a go, because if you can’t – well then, maybe it’s not possible,”’ Cooper remembers. ‘And I thought – no, no, it has to be.’
That was in 1999, and fortunately for all the female ministers who’ve followed, it was possible. Cooper went on to have two more children, now grown up, with husband Ed Balls, and a string of senior Cabinet jobs, before returning to the health department this autumn as its boss. But along the way, she fought battles over her working hours and, with her second child in 2001, over being the first minister to take maternity leave. Unsure how to handle this novelty, officials initially loaded her work onto colleagues instead of hiring maternity cover, she says – with the guilt-inducing result that on returning she was told, ‘Thank the other ministers, because they’ve been taking on a lot for you.’
It’s not been an easy ride, which may help explain why she’s now sending ‘very loud signals through the system’ that women and children’s welfare must be taken more seriously.
We’re speaking minutes after Cooper has told the Labour Party conference that violence against women and girls should be considered a public health issue – meaning a focus on prevention, not just patching victims up in hospital. Public health directors will, she explains, identify root causes and patterns in violence: ‘Are some of the biggest problems in teenage relationships? Is it linked to particular areas – is it late night drinking that’s having a particular impact? Where is it happening, in what ways, what can you do in really practical terms to prevent it or to intervene?’
Her other big focus, following a series of labour ward scandals, is on maternity services from conception through children’s early years. ‘More than half a million women give birth in our NHS each year – more than the number of people who have hip and knee operations put together,’ says Cooper. She says she had ‘wonderful support’ in labour, but not everybody does. ‘Because it’s the start of a new life, if things go wrong during pregnancy or in maternity units or in the first few years, then that harm and trauma can last for a really long time.’ She’s reviving national standards for maternity care – which she first introduced as a junior health minister in the 2000s, only to see them scrapped by the Conservatives – and examining everything from postpartum care to miscarriage.
On the latter issue, the NHS often won’t run tests until a woman has lost three babies, after which it can be harrowing to discover there was a treatable cause. Does Cooper support the charity Tommy’s in its campaign for earlier investigation of miscarriages? ‘Tommy’s is doing some important work and I want to look at that – I do take it really seriously,’ she says quietly. ‘I had a miscarriage between our second and third child – I was lucky, it just happened once, it was at a relatively early stage. But even at the early stages it can be really hard, and for families who go through repeat miscarriages it can be devastating.’
Maternity services aren’t alone in causing concern; a Mumsnet survey this year found that 68% of users didn’t believe doctors take women’s health seriously across the board. ‘It is just baffling to me that questions about the menopause were only added to the NHS routine health check for the over-forties this April,’ says Cooper, who is also concerned about long waiting times for diagnosing conditions like endometriosis. ‘I think there is that sense that women have too often been expected to endure things because it’s seen as a sort of stoic strength of womanhood, when actually every woman has a right to expect good healthcare.’
'Women are expected to endure things with a stoic strength'
Yet interestingly, she won’t repeat her predecessor Wes Streeting’s charge that the NHS is institutionally misogynistic: instead she’d rather discuss exactly how things will change. It’s the way she has always operated – head down and focus, whatever the noise. As Foreign Secretary, that meant handling everything from Donald Trump to public anger over the war in Gaza.
Since her successor Ed Miliband has just announced tougher sanctions on Israel, I wonder if she now regrets not doing more. But Cooper insists she was actually working up those sanctions in her final months. ‘I strongly support all of the things that Ed has announced – they were exactly the things we were working on while I was in the Foreign Office.’
Now she’s on the frontline of Andy Burnham’s mission to reform social care instead, something the family experienced when her mother-in-law was diagnosed with dementia. (Cooper is appointing a champion for unpaid family carers because ‘they can feel like they just disappear’.)
So what’s her secret for balancing work and family life? She recalls the days of small children running amok on the train from London to her Yorkshire constituency. ‘You have to have a sense that it’s always going to be chaos and it doesn’t matter, so long as we’re relaxed about it,’ she says. Maybe that’s a good mantra for surviving politics, too.