article: The last week of Yvette Cooper's leadership campaign isn't exactly how she predicted it. She has spent more time in Parliament than on the stump. As shadow home secretary she has been leading her party's response to the refugee crisis - initially calling on the government to do more, and now pressing for some of those families who have already fled to Europe to be resettled here. This has helped, rather than harmed, her leadership chances but has also meant more conventional campaigning has had to be discarded. "I tend to respond most strongly to the most serious issues but I'm trying to keep this apart from the leadership contest, and trying to get cross party agreement to an appropriate response to the refugee crisis," she tells me. While I met her rivals "on the road" at rallies and meetings, we meet in her parliamentary office. She was on the front bench for David Cameron's statement on Monday, then was granted her own emergency debate on the crisis on Tuesday, and had sat alongside Harriet Harman - for whom she worked when Labour was in opposition in the 1990s - for her last Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. She still hopes to be taking over from her old boss when Labour's new leader is announced on Saturday but her team admits it will be an uphill struggle. She seems to be ending the campaign strongly, but has she left it too late? "The next week will define the next ten years' she declares. "My message now is look, we lost in 2015, it's really hard to win general elections -we need the best chance of doing so and a lot of people who depend on us will be let down if we veer away from the challenges of the future and look back to our party's history." Translated, that is please don't back Jeremy Corbyn. But she admits that her campaign got off to a slow start. "Some people were planning their leadership campaigns for a long time. I wasn't. "We were doing things from scratch. In the first month of the campaign I found it hard to come out of the shadow of the general election which we were so devastated at losing. I would go to meetings and people were just on the floor." But, she says, she has been consistent throughout her campaign in arguing for high quality manufacturing jobs, doubling investment in science, and for free childcare. So what brought her into politics in the first place? "My dad (Tony) was a full time trade unionist. My mother came from a mining community so it was a Labour family but we didn't talk about party politics - we talked about issues and ideas. "I first got involved campaigning against Section 28 (Conservative legislation that banned promotion of homosexuality a a 'pretended family relationship' in schools in England) -and I went with my Dad on the People's March for Jobs when I was 12 or 13." She was born in 1969 so her teenage years were spent under Margaret
summary: In the fourth of a series of in-depth profiles of the Labour leadership candidates, Iain Watson catches up with Yvette Cooper.