We won’t engage in negative briefing against other leadership candidates, say Cooper’s campaign team

Yvette Cooper’s campaign team have said they won’t engage in “unpleasant anonymous briefing[s] and counter-briefing[s]” in the Labour leadership race.

Cooper is standing against Andy Burnham, Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Kendall to be Labour’s next leader.

One of her campaign chairs, Shabana Mahmood, has said that ‘negative briefing’ against other candidates has no place in the contest. She has promised other campaign teams “if anyone is speaking on behalf of the [Yvette for Leader] campaign, they will do so explicitly on the record”  and that if anyone is claiming to speak on behalf of Cooper’s team and is criticising opponents “they do not speak for the campaign or Yvette.”

In an article in the Huffington Post, Mahmood, who is also Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, she asks other campaigns to follow suit as she says briefing against one another “hurts only ourselves and it’s what the Tories want us to do.”

This comes after reports that anonymous sources told the Daily Telegraph that Kendall’s chances were waning and someone described Kendall’s leadership campaign as like “Taliban New Labour”. Both Burnham and Cooper’s campaign teams deny the comments came from their camp.

Mahmood, who was speaking on behalf of the Cooper campaign, made the following two promises:

1. If anyone is speaking on behalf of the campaign, they will do so explicitly on the record. There will be no unattributed negative briefings about other candidates because that’s not the kind of politics Yvette has ever wanted to champion.

2. If anyone else is speaking to you and claiming to do so on Yvette’s behalf and wants to criticise opponents – you can take it from me that they do not speak for the campaign or Yvette – and if she or I get to hear about it they will have lost our trust and our respect. I hope that all of the candidates will join me in making that pledge