Cooper, Yvette (1969– )

UK centre-left politician, chief secretary to the Treasury from 2008. Before being elected a member of Parliament (MP) in 1997, she worked as a researcher and advisor to senior Labour Party politicians and as a journalist. Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, she held junior ministerial positions and had responsibility for developing the scheme for home information packs (HIPs) on the sale of houses. A strong supporter of Gordon Brown, she was promoted to the position of housing minister when Brown became prime minister in June 2007, and in a government re-shuffle in January 2008 was promoted to the cabinet, as chief secretary to the Treasury.

Born in Inverness, she studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University and also studied at Harvard University, with a Kennedy Scholarship; she gained an MSc in economics at the London School of Economics. Before being elected to Parliament in 1997 as Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford constituency, she was a researcher and advisor to John Smith, Labour's shadow chancellor, 1990–92; to Bill Clinton, the US Democrat presidential candidate 1992; to Harriet Harman, Labour's shadow chief secretary to the Treasury 1992–94; and economics correspondent with The Independent 1995–97. Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed her an undersecretary of state in 1999 in the Department of Health, and in 2003 she moved to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and, in 2005, to the Department of Communities and Local Government, as a minister of state.

In 1998, she married Ed Balls, the advisor to chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who also became an MP in 2005 and a cabinet minister in 2007. They became the first married couple to serve as cabinet ministers at the same time.