by Ed Balls
Gordon and Sarah Brown had children soon after Yvette and me. They too decided to keep their children out of the public eye. Tragically for Gordon and Sarah, that choice was cruelly taken out of their hands after the tragic death of their first child Jennifer in 2001, and then again in 2006, when the news was leaked from a hospital in Edinburgh to the Sun newspaper that their third child had been born with cystic fibrosis, something they had decided should stay between them, their son and the medical experts. It was an outrageous breach, and one which upset them greatly.
When Gordon was prime minister, he and Sarah stuck determinedly to their view that their children were not public figures and should be kept out of the public eye – until the very end of his prime ministership, when the family finally left Downing Street. It had become clear that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg had chosen to form a coalition with the Conservative Party and Gordon and Sarah decided that they would depart Downing Street on their own terms. With cameras all around and a helicopter above, they walked together with their two sons down Downing Street for the first and last time. Their life there was ending, as was Gordon’s career in frontline politics. After protecting the privacy of their sons for all those years, they decided their boys should be able to remember that day and have pictures of them all leaving the place where they had lived as a family and shared experiences which had so powerfully shaped their lives.
It’s so easy for the children of politicians simply to become part of the backdrop for photo opportunities, and it’s what the modern media have come to expect. But Gordon and Sarah never allowed that to happen, and – for all the other strains and stresses that our careers have put our children through – Yvette and I have never regretted taking the same approach. Our oldest daughter explained it to us one day: ‘When I walk across the playground,’ she said, ‘I want people to see me for who I am, not as your daughter, the child of Cabinet ministers. I want to be me first.’ At least in that regard, I hope we’ve done the best we could for our kids.
STRAWBERRIES & CREAM BIRTHDAY CAKE
Serves 10
With birthday cakes, most children only really want to eat the icing and the decoration – it will be the adults who have to eat the sponge. So if you just go for something sweet and sickly and not something the adults will want, you’ll end up with a lot of leftover cake.
My breakthrough in cake-making came when my friend, Brigit, told me of a fantastic sponge recipe she had found in which double cream is substituted for butter. If you make this simple sponge cake filled with double cream and strawberries, the cake itself is infused with the richness and deliciousness of double cream as much as the filling.
But even if you’re making a rugby pitch or a pirate ship, this cake is sufficiently strong and robust to deal with multi-layered design on the outside while the inside still tastes great (if you are building a cake with multiple layers, it’s definitely worth cooking the cake at the higher temperature in the recipe). I used this recipe for my ski jump cake on Sport Relief Bake Off and then to make a pirate ship on Celebrity Best Home Cook. It’s a cake which adults can enjoy just as much as children.
I’ve found that buttercream is best for the outer covering of the cake, but I’ve never succeeded in changing the colour with food colouring. So when I want to decorate with coloured icing – whether that’s making people, shapes or letters – I buy separate coloured fondant icing and roll it out.
But always, if you possibly can, give yourself enough time so that the cake can cool. Then, when you smear on the buttercream, put it back in the fridge to cool before adding some more and then smoothing it over with a flat knife. It’s so much easier to decorate onto smooth, cooled buttercream.
INGREDIENTS
Butter to grease tins
350g caster sugar
300ml double cream
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
350g self-raising flour
FOR THE TOPPING
300g strawberries, washed, de-headed and halved
300ml double cream, whipped
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3 (or 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5 if you want a firmer, crisper cake for pirate ship building). Grease two sandwich tins and line with baking paper.
Combine 300ml of the double cream and the caster sugar and whisk for 30 seconds until well creamed. Then add the eggs one at a time, beating for 20 seconds between each egg. Add the vanilla essence and then the flour and mix until just fully incorporated.
Put the cake mixture into the sandwich tins, put them side by side in the oven and bake for 35 minutes before checking – a knife should come out clean when poked through the centre. When cooked (they’ll probably need another 5 minutes if you have gone for the lower oven temperature), leave in the tins for 5 minutes and then turn out carefully and leave to completely cool.
Beat the cream until it starts to stiffen (this is easier if the cream is at room temperature). Put half the whipped cream on the curved side of one cake and arrange half the strawberries, cut side up. Put the other cake on top, smear the remaining cream over the top and gently place the rest of the strawberries, cut side down, on the cream.
SAUSAGES & ONION GRAVY
Serves 4
My first-ever trip to the Lake District made a great impression on me – and not just because of the scenery. I was ten years old and my dad took my little brother and me to visit his old biology teacher. After a long drive from our house in Nottingham, we set off the next day to climb up to ‘High Street’ from Haweswater and see the Lakeland peaks in all their majesty. What I remember best, however, was not the climb and the views or even the packed lunch, but dinner that evening: my first proper Cumberland sausage. My pre-vegetarian brother and I both loved it, and the next day, we visited a butcher’s shop in Kendal and bought some to take home from one of the huge coils stacked behind the counter. We all loved the peppery, herby flavour, which was like nothing we’d tasted before. These days you can get Cumberland sausages with onion gravy on every pub lunch menu, but forty years ago this dish was only common in the Lake District.
Our children loved sausages when they were little, but doggedly refused to eat my onion gravy. No matter, because it just meant I could have as much as I wanted – a rare luxury for the father of the house in my culinary lifetime. Some people swear by frying sausages, others prefer to grill, but I always think they taste better when they are cooked in the oven and don’t spit out all their juice. I use stock for this recipe, but you could easily use water with half a stock cube or, even better, leftover gravy from the Sunday roast.
INGREDIENTS
6 good pork sausages (Cumberland if you can find them)
1 tbsp olive oil
3 onions, peeled, halved and sliced
1 tbsp plain flour
300ml stock – chicken or beef
1 ½ tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas mark 5. Put the sausages on an ovenproof dish and cook in the oven for 30 minutes.
Heat the olive oil in a saucepan and drop in the sliced onions. Turn down to a moderate heat and allow the onions to brown and caramelise for 20 minutes. Then mix in the flour and cook for a minute before adding the stock. Bring to the boil, stirring to thicken, add the Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper and then simmer for a further 10 minutes.
7 WEEKEND COOKING
Yvette and I were the first married couple in British history to be in the Cabinet together.
A nice fact to tell the grandchildren one day, fingers crossed, and hopefully by then we’ll have forgotten how unbelievably tiring, hectic and stressful that period of our lives was, and how weird most people thought it was to have a married couple both doing that kind of job. I used to look back on the Sundays of my youth: the rituals, the patterns – roast lunch, football, the BBC serial and Mum’s tea, a true day of rest – and wonder what we were doing to our kids by compariso
n, dragging them down to London every Sunday evening for another week of work and school, before going back home to Yorkshire on Thursday or Friday.
Almost by default, Saturday night dinner became the highlight of my week, not least because it was the one evening I could guarantee we’d all be together and just be able to relax, eat and watch TV as a family. I would go to the butcher’s in the morning and always have dinner ready for 7 p.m., followed by a film chosen by the kids on a weekly rota. Then, much to the amusement and teasing of everyone else, with dinner eaten and a couple of glasses of wine inside, the exhaustion of the week would take over and I’d nod off. I can’t tell you how many films I’ve seen the first half of. Did the Incredibles defeat Syndrome? Did the Ents decide to help the Hobbits? I assume so, but I was fast asleep by the time they got round to it.
Carting our three kids across the country twice every week was a drag for them, but we had no choice. Our home was in Castleford and Yvette needed to be there for her constituency work at the weekends – a weekly round of visits to schools and local businesses, meetings with the local council or NHS managers and then hours of surgeries with constituents trying to solve every kind of problem you can imagine. But she had to be in London for Parliament during the week. Once I joined her as an MP in the next-door seat of Normanton, that went for both of us. It was exhausting and relentless but became normal for our family.
Our Sunday train rides down to London became an important part of our family time. We read, talked, played games, watched videos, and got to know the train buffet menu off by heart. We spent so much time on the train that the first words our eldest daughter learned to read were the station names of Grantham – which sounded like Grandma – and Peterborough. The travelling was fine until it went wrong: a flat car battery when we arrived late at night at the railway car park, or problems on the line, always guaranteed to come when the trains were most crowded, and when one of us was having to take the kids on our own.
On those occasional solo journeys, usually when one of us was having to stay late in London for work, we discovered an unexpected gender bias in operation. If Yvette got on a crowded Friday train with the kids in tow, usually wrestling a pushchair and clutching a rucksack stuffed with nappies and snacks, the commuters sitting close by – mostly men – would smile sympathetically, but she never got asked if she needed a hand. With me it was the opposite. When I invariably found myself struggling while getting aboard, I’d always find one of the other men leaping up to get involved, whether it was stretching out their arms to jiggle the baby while I got things sorted or taking charge of getting the pushchair stowed. Whenever Yvette and I tried to rationalise that particular piece of gender politics, Yvette always had the failsafe, fallback argument that I clearly just looked more desperately in need of help than she did.
Either way, it was always a very different story when we took the kids down on a Monday morning rather than on Sunday night. Then we got the full-on grumpy commuter treatment, and neither I nor Yvette was going to be offered any help at all. On a Friday, the men in suits would smile and laugh when our daughter’s toy talking telephone rang. On a Monday, they’d look like they wanted to strangle me with the cord.
I did sometimes wonder whether I was one of those dads too, glad to chip in to the childcare duties at the weekend, taking the lead on all the cooking and shopping, but firmly wearing my work hat Monday to Friday. We had Yvette’s mum, June, helping out as well as regular childcare, and when in London we lived just a five-minute car journey from Parliament. But it was Yvette who tended to come back in the evening to read stories before returning to the House of Commons for the ten o’clock votes. By comparison, I worked my normal, long hours just like everyone else at the Treasury, especially before big events like the Budget.
My main weekday childcare task in those early years was to take our eldest daughter to the nursery class every Monday morning. I loved those short walks, chatting with her about the day ahead. But it was not without its difficulties. Halfway through her first year, on a Monday morning in February, we set off to school, chatting away. I didn’t notice that the walk to school was a little quieter than usual. When we arrived, the gate was shut tight. I assumed that we were late somehow and everyone was already inside. I shook the gate trying to make it open, with my daughter holding my hand and looking up at me patiently – until the caretaker came round the corner of the playground and said, ‘Sorry, mate, it’s half term.’
We walked home, with me feeling a little embarrassed. I rationalised it as the kind of mistake any new parent could make. The following Monday, we made the same journey, experienced the same quieter-than-they-should-be streets, and arrived at the same locked school gate. It was an inset day. This time, as we walked home, my beloved first-born looked up at me with a disappointed yet resigned look that I’ll never forget and said, ‘Can Mum take me next week?’
Thank goodness we had my mother-in-law, June, to rely on. She gave up her job as an A Level maths teacher soon after our eldest daughter was born and regularly travelled up once or twice a week after that to look after the kids any time work got too busy or we had a childcare emergency. June would chat with them, help with schoolwork, cook their dinner, whip up yet another batch of pancakes, and make sure someone was there when the hours were just too long for our other child carers to manage. I know at times I frustrated June, arriving home late, making too much noise, bashing around in the kitchen and waking up the kids and her in the process. She was never shy in telling me either. But I hugely appreciated what she did for us and I think she understood how hard Yvette and I were working, and why.
There was one time, though, even with all her patience, love and experience, when it got all too much. I arrived home to find her slumped in a chair, shell-shocked and thoroughly outmanoeuvred. I asked what had happened. She said: ‘Well, your son was being naughty and hiding under the table, refusing to come out. I told him I’d have to send him to bed. I said, “Come out now or I’ll clip you round the ear.” ‘And’, June continued in a bewildered tone, ‘your eight-year-old daughter said to me, “Grandma, it’s not going to work. Don’t you understand? You can’t use twentieth-century techniques on twenty-first-century children.” ’ June was gobsmacked. And so was I. But Yvette and I figured that whatever else we were doing to our kids with our dysfunctional, itinerant lifestyle, it wasn’t affecting their ability to get the better of their elders.
I knew life wouldn’t get any easier when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007 and Yvette and I were both appointed to the Cabinet. The responsibilities were great – me leading the new children’s department and Yvette in charge of housing – the working hours were long and there were regular evening parliamentary votes. Despite the efforts of reformers to reduce evening sittings, change was happening only very slowly. Yvette somehow managed to do her red box papers during the day, but I would return home in the evening at eleven and then spend a couple of hours every night reading and signing papers before going off in the car again at 7.30 a.m. I often didn’t see the children all week.
It was hard for both of us, doing demanding jobs, struggling to look after three children under eight, all of us travelling 400 miles every weekend by train, dealing with the media and being a married couple in the Cabinet. Hard, but harder for Yvette. After all, no one ever called me Mr Cooper or ‘Yvette Cooper’s husband’ live on national TV. The focus groups showed people thought it was weird that we were both politicians – ‘Do they only talk about politics at home?’, ‘Will they make their kids be politicians too?’ – but somehow, ridiculously, that made them feel more negative towards Yvette than me. That was especially unfair because, while I sometimes zoned out of family life on very busy days, Yvette was always present for the kids, taking their phone calls during the day and rushing back home for bedtimes.
Gordon didn’t help when he moved the weekly Cabinet meetings to an earlier 9 a.m. start –one of the least family-friendly changes ever. Yvette tried several ti
mes to organise a rebellion, but to no avail. June would arrive on Cabinet meeting days at 8 a.m. and we’d rush out of the house into a car and arrive at Downing Street with a minute or so to spare, always cutting it fine but never actually late. It’s no wonder we look a bit stressed and dishevelled in every photograph of us walking up Downing Street together.
Weekends were no better. We weren’t allowed to take the confidential papers in our ministerial red boxes home on the train, so every Saturday morning the doorbell would ring at 8 a.m. with a postal worker delivering them by secure mail instead. We’d have Saturday and Sunday morning to go through them – reading papers, signing letters, and taking decisions – so that all the work was done by Sunday lunchtime, when the postal van would arrive to collect the boxes and send them back down to Whitehall along with the rest of the overnight post. We’d wolf down Sunday roast lunch with the kids, then whisk them off to get the train.
That’s why those Saturday evening dinners at home in Castleford were so special to me: the one precious bit of family time carved out of an otherwise non-stop life of work and stress. I would shop each week at Farmer Copley’s, a local farm shop in Pontefract, which sells its own beef – the best in Yorkshire – and we had it most Saturday nights, cooked in a variety of different ways depending on the cut.
I’d like to say no two Saturday dinners were the same, and I did experiment with different cuisines and dishes, including a wide range of Asian-influenced recipes, from Hong Kong-style stir-fry noodles to creamy Thai curries. Over time, however, we developed some go-to favourites; the kind of meals I knew everyone loved, even our son, and which I got better at cooking thanks to repetition and the search for perfection. Top of my list – as you’d expect from a butcher’s grandson – was sirloin steak, coated on one side with a dry spicy Texan rub, served with oven-roasted potatoes, doused in olive oil, rosemary and garlic, and thick spicy Cajun beans, all followed by sticky toffee pudding or apple and blackberry crumble and custard for dessert. And I wondered why I always fell asleep halfway through the film that followed…