Yvette Cooper has said Theresa May is too brittle and rigid in her thinking to be a good leader, as she launched a personal attack on her old adversary for cutting the number of armed police at a faster rate than other officers.



The former shadow home secretary, who spent five years facing May across the dispatch box when she was home secretary, said people were beginning to become aware of the prime minister’s poor decisions and panicky reactions as she comes under pressure over police cuts.

Cooper produced figures showing that the number of armed officers has been cut by more than 1,000 since 2010 and that they have been cut at a faster rate than other officers.

There has been a 13.1% fall in the number of police overall since March 2009 but a 18% drop in the number of armed officers, Cooper said.

The Labour politician, who ran unsuccessfully for the party’s leadership, said May had asked voters to judge her on her record and had been caught out over the issue, after years of police warnings that they were being stretched by a combination of cuts and an emerging wave of new threats.

“Instead, as home secretary, she pushed through £2bn of cuts, which saw the loss of 20,000 police officers, including 1,337 armed officers,” Cooper said.



“She is quite brittle and the more that unravels, the more people are seeing the truth. You’ve got to be able to listen to a lot of different people and not just get stuck in a bunker on your own and be very rigid in your approach.



“My experience of her is that she finds it difficult to change her view and then when she does, pretends that she hasn’t. Rather than being able to respond in a confident way, instead we’ve seen her respond in a way that is first rigid and then panicky as a result.”

Although she has been a critic of Jeremy Corbyn in the past and lost to him in the leadership race of 2015, Cooper said the country would be safer if Labour was elected, because of the party’s commitment to recruiting 10,000 more police.

“I think if you’ve got more police on the streets, that is really important. I think there will be some issues where there is cross-party agreement, like the response to the attack in Manchester where I don’t think there would be any disagreement from any of us,” she said. “And I think it is better for the country to have more police on the beat, and in the end that is what only the Labour party are putting forward.”

Cooper was one of those who supported the no confidence motion in Corbyn last year, saying he was “losing us Labour support across the country” and that there was a “political vacuum” after Brexit when leadership was needed.

But she acknowledged the Labour leader had fought hard during the campaign and that support for the party was “moving in the right direction”, although she said many were sceptical about polls generally after they showed a lead for Ed Miliband in 2015.



“Jeremy is working incredibly hard doing rallies and interviews and it is all of our jobs to support him right now in all of that work. We know, because of when Theresa May called this, what she wants to do. Jeremy is working hard to expose that and we’ve got to back him in that,” she said.



Asked whether she would be prepared to take a role in a Corbyn cabinet, she said: “That’s got to be something for Jeremy to decide. I don’t think any of us should be pre-empting those sorts of decisions or pre-empting the votes people will have.”

However, Cooper did not rule out another attempt at running for the leadership, as she dodged a question on whether she would be interested if the party lost the election and there was a vacancy at the top.

“I think that is the wrong thing for us to be talking about when we’ve got people wanting to know: are we trying to get a Labour government in place, are we getting Labour MPs elected. That’s what we’ve got to be concentrating on,” she said.