Starmer facing pressure to punish Cooper for failing to back attack ad

Starmer facing pressure to punish Yvette Cooper for failing to back Labour’s ‘child sex abusers escape prison’ attack ad on PM Rishi Sunak

• Ms Cooper has been accused of stabbing the Party’s campaign team in the back
• It emerged last week that she had not been consulted about the Twitter attack ad

Sir Keir Starmer is facing pressure to punish Yvette Cooper for failing to back Labour’s ‘child sex abusers escape prison’ attack advertisement on Rishi Sunak.

The Labour leader is being urged to demote the Shadow Home Secretary for allegedly stabbing the Party’s campaign team in the back by distancing herself from the controversial strategy.

So angry were colleagues with Ms Cooper that one Labour veteran last night privately predicted ‘long term, I don’t think she’ll survive in the job’. He added: ‘People who were sceptical of the campaign or supportive of it are universally condemning 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 advertisement suggested the Prime Minister did not want adults convicted of sexually abusing children to be jailed.

Pictured: Yvette Cooper (File photo). The Labour leader is being urged to demote the Shadow Home Secretary for allegedly stabbing the Party’s campaign team in the back by distancing herself from the controversial strategy

The much-criticised tweet – part of a social media blitz against the Tories – has been hailed by Labour Party managers as a huge success.

It has been viewed more than 20 million times despite being branded ‘gutter politics’ by critics and with ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett saying: ‘My party is better than this.’

Ms Cooper later retweeted an article by Sir Keir in last Monday’s Daily Mail in which he said he backed ‘every word Labour has said’ on crime.

However, the Labour veteran who was criticising her said that whatever Ms Cooper’s personal views on the advertisement, she or her office should not have said she was not informed about it in advance. He said: ‘As it happens, it wasn’t her home affairs brief, so she wouldn’t be consulted. What you do not do is wait until your troops are doing hand-to-hand combat, then stab them in the back.’

Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer (File photo). 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 soft on immigration and said she preferred to ‘talk to the party members, not the voters’.

That’s because Ms Cooper, who stood unsuccessfully to be Labour leader in 2015, ‘thinks she’s in with a shout’ and is ‘trying not to alienate the membership’.

Questions were also raised as to why Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting did not retweet the controversial advertisement.

But Mr Streeting tells The Mail on Sunday today he had been ‘on holiday’ and was ‘fully supportive’ of the campaign. Ms Cooper was approached for comment.

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