Yvette Cooper repay the money. After Labour were defeated at the 2010 general election, Cooper and her husband Ed Balls were both mentioned in the press as a potential leadership candidates when Gordon Brown resigned as Leader of the Labour Party. Before Balls announced his candidacy, he offered to stand aside if Cooper wanted to stand, but Cooper declined for the sake of their children, stating that it would not be the right time for her. She later topped the 2010 ballot for places in the Shadow Cabinet, and there was speculation that the newly elected Labour Leader Ed Miliband would appoint
Yvette Cooper the Labour Party Conference in 2014 about eastern Europeans who were mistreated by employers of migrant labour. Cooper was strongly critical of the cuts to child tax credit announced by George Osborne in the July 2015 Budget; she authored the following statement in the "New Statesman": In 2015, she was nominated as one of four candidates for the Labour leadership following the party's defeat at the 2015 general election and the resignation of Ed Miliband. Cooper was officially nominated by 59 MPs, 12 MEPs, 109 CLPs, two affiliated trade unions and one socialist society. "The Guardian" newspaper endorsed Cooper as