Labour leadership: Yvette Cooper's asylum speech proves she has what it takes to lead

Maybe it’s too late to swing the voting for the Labour leadership. But Yvette Cooper’s speech on Tuesday on asylum is one of the very few in the contest so far, if not the only one, with at least a chance of remaking the political weather, and perhaps even in time of changing public policy. This isn’t just because of the passion with which she delivered her call for the admission of 10,000 refugees from Syria, or because she was saying something that, as she herself understated it, “won’t be popular with everyone”, but because she used her position as shadow Home Secretary to connect an often dismally parochial internal party contest to the most important crisis in the real world.