They are one of the most powerful couples in Britain: together, they run much of the education system and welfare state. They control Whitehall departments with a combined budget of £210 billion.
But while Ed Balls, the children’s secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the work and pensions secretary, are spirited around in his’n’hers chauffeur-driven ministerial cars during working hours, at home they get about in a battered old Ford Mondeo whose seats, strewn with biscuit crumbs, empty sweet packets and discarded plastic toys, show just how messy life can get when you are trying to combine two cabinet jobs in London with a family life in Yorkshire.
It’s a lifestyle that involves two sets of everything — two homes, two wardrobes, two groups of friends, two weekly supermarket shops. Not surprisingly, there are regular cock-ups.
“I’ve lost count of the mistakes we’ve made,” Balls says cheerfully. “I do the supermarket shop online, but sometimes I press the wrong delivery address, and it goes to the wrong home. Next thing I know, the van driver is on the phone saying he’s outside, but we’re hundreds of miles away. Then there are the times I’ve had to call the AA out because the car battery is flat. It’s usually because I’ve left the light on in the boot as I’ve been rushing for the train. I’ve left a couple of nice suits on the train.
“Oh yes, and a couple of times I’ve taken the kids to school on an Inset [teacher training] day. Now that is really embarrassing. Though I’ve not done that since I’ve been in this job,” he adds hastily, perhaps fearing it could look a bit too scatty, when he is supposed to be in charge of the education system.
It is Friday morning, and Balls and Cooper are about to catch the 9.35am train from London to Leeds, heading for their constituencies in Yorkshire. A few minutes before their departure from King’s Cross, there is an agonised telephone conversation with a mandarin. They are running late after dropping the kids off at school — they have three, all under 11 — and one of them doesn’t have a ticket.
I catch some muttering about whether the platform barriers are manned, and for a dizzy moment I wonder if they plan to try to board without a ticket. Luckily, it doesn’t come to that: the official scuttles off to buy them a ticket, and seconds before the train is due to depart, the couple appear, hurtling across the station concourse with a retinue of aides. They leap onto the train, dignity just intact, while the guard grins — he’s seen it all before.
“We’ve got it timed exactly,” Balls says. “If we leave for the station a moment after 9.01am, though, we know we probably won’t make it.”
During the week, the family lives in a smart Edwardian town house in Stoke Newington, north London, having moved from inner-city Lambeth, in the south of the capital. On Fridays, the family decamps to a house in Castleford, West Yorkshire, a two-hour train journey — though they rarely travel together. A nanny usually accompanies the children on the journey north after school, then, as Balls puts it, “crosses the platform and heads back to London”.
It must be quite tough for the children, having to leave their school friends behind in London at the weekend, and ferry favourite toys up and down the country. In Balls’s and Cooper’s defence, all this desperate juggling is to enable them to spend more, not less, time with the kids.
Balls says things were even more complicated when the children, Ellie, Joe and Maddy, were younger. Though Cooper was the first government minister to take maternity leave — she had six months off — once she went back to work, Balls often found himself juggling babies, ministerial boxes and pushchairs on packed trains.
“Pushchairs were a nightmare. If you are a woman alone on a train, with a small baby, people kind of leave you alone. Nobody would ever help Yvette. But when it was me, trying to carry the baby and sort out the pushchair at the same time, some bloke would eventually take pity on me and lean over and say, ‘Can I assist?’”
The whole setup must be eye-wateringly expensive, though of course the taxpayer subsidises most of their travel and the running of their London property, which they have designated their second home for expenses purposes. It’s a touchy subject — Balls and Cooper have faced accusations of “flipping” the accommodation to maximise allowances, but they insist there is no doubt in their minds that home is Castleford.
“For the children, it’s more 50/50, but for us, we are not ever in the London house except when it is dark. This [Yorkshire] is where we relax, where we are at Christmas and so on. There is a sort of relief you feel when you get on the train,” Balls says.
With two huge government departments to run — he is in charge of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, while she heads the Department for Work and Pensions — it is hard to imagine how there is ever any downtime in their household, but they say they have decent holidays and relax properly at weekends. This August they went to stay with Balls’s brother and sister-in-law on the west coast of America, piling into a camper van for a tour of some national parks. Who did the driving, I ask.
“I did,” Balls says. “We went with another family and we had these walkietalkies to keep in touch. It was brilliant.”
Cooper, who is in earshot, interjects.
“Did he tell you about the bump on the first day? You’d think the lanes on those American roads were quite wide, wouldn’t you?” she teases.
The way he paints it, Balls is something of a domestic god — organising the weekly shop, sorting out everyday stuff such as taxing and insuring the car, and doing the cooking. He’s keen on American southern cooking — cajun and creole — and says he likes to do “barbecues — though proper stuff, not sausages”.
With an education system to fix, and a prime minister to prop up — Balls is considered Gordon Brown’s closest cabinet ally — I doubt there’s much time to hone the barbecuing skills. They had children at a sink school, Grazebrook primary, when in 2008 Ofsted concluded it was “failing to give its pupils an acceptable level of education”.
It must have been horribly embarrassing for Balls, but it had an upside — at least nobody could accuse him and his wife of hypocrisy about where they educate their children. In any case, Balls is convinced such failing schools are rapidly becoming a dying breed.
He rattles off some impressive-sounding statistics about progress under Labour: in 1997 around half of all secondary schools were failing to get at least 30% of their pupils through five GCSEs including English and maths, at A-C grade. Now only one in 10 schools performs this dismally. It sounds good, but isn’t 30% a pretty low threshold to set for success?
“Obviously, that’s not the summit of our ambitions,” Balls says briskly, adding that in the average school, 48% of pupils get five or more GCSEs. However, there’s still a mountain to climb, with latest primary school league tables showing 150,000 children are unable to read and write at age 11.
It is these failures that have fuelled interest in Tory plans to allow parents to set up their own schools, especially in London. The proposals, though vague, seem to have touched a real nerve with the public: I know of several mothers, not necessarily Tories but fed up with the schools on offer, who are positively evangelical on the subject. Balls has no truck with the Conservatives’ idea, which is based on a system in Sweden. He labels it “random, unfair and hugely expensive” and says it could “blight a whole generation of kids”.
“There is no way you could run a school system this way,” he puffs. Balls is widely expected to run for the party leadership when Brown steps down. Last week he wrote a piece for the New Statesman criticising the free market, in what was interpreted at Westminster as a pitch for the left.
He always used to be open about wanting to be chancellor — a move he was denied at the 11th hour in Brown’s disastrous last reshuffle — so perhaps he will come clean now about wanting to be leader? “To be good at politics, you have got to be strategic and think about the future,” he says, though he insists he’s “not consumed” about his next career step. When pressed, he adds: “Most people don’t say ‘never’ to doing the most difficult job.” This is about as close to a “yes” as cabinet etiquette allows.
At the moment, he’s focused on how his department can make the huge savings that will be necessary across Whitehall as a result of the recession. He’s full of talk about “tough choices” and has done detailed work on where the axe might fall.
I doubt it will win him many friends in the cabinet — now they will all be under pressure to do the same thing — but it makes it look as if he is on top of things.
At Westminster he has a reputation as something of a bully and is close friends with Damian McBride, Brown’s disgraced spin doctor, who suddenly left office after his smear tactics were exposed in The Sunday Times. Is Balls still in touch with him or is McBride now too politically toxic? “The kind of person who just drops personal friends like that would not be the kind of person I would respect,” he replies. “It was a tragedy and terrible ... and I told him so.” It’s not altogether clear if he’s lamenting McBride’s tactics or his departure.
The train pulls in at Wakefield, and we set off to visit a thriving city academy. He opens a film club at the school — it has its very own cinema — telling the pupils his favourite movies are Some Like It Hot and The Jungle Book.
A child asks if a film has ever made him cry. “Oh, loads of times,” he says breezily.There’s a bit in The Sound of Music that never fails to gets to him. And there’s a scene in Disney’s Robin Hood where the sheriff takes a gold coin from an impoverished family of rabbits.
“I always cry at the injustice of that,” he says. His tear ducts are clearly on message.
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