Centre thought  Daisy Cooper would abolish the Treasury to boost growth

The rules were clear: no cameras, no video, let your hair down. “They put my name next to the final song of the night: Bohemian Rhapsody,” Cooper, deputy leader and Treasury spokeswoman for the Liberal Democrats, recalls. “And then I heard someone say, ‘Oh it’s the MP, she’s coming on stage.’”

Neither the crowd nor the local press had got the memo. “All the cameras and phones then came out,” Cooper says. “That was the only bit that got filmed. The local newspaper was there and got a snap. And that was the front page of the magazine.”

Said magazine cover now resides on the wall of Cooper’s office, a permanent reminder that life, like politics, is erratic: that sometimes you must take things as they come to you. The opinion polls indicate little about the likely balance of power following the next general election. Reform has the edge. But no party has managed to establish a convincing lead. The Liberal Democrats could again be kingmakers, just as they were in 2010. Would she be prepared to coalesce with a rival party?

“I always compare politics to athletics,” she says. “And you never think about what you do after you get over the finish line. You have to focus on how you’re going to run your best race and how you’re going to get your best result. The reality is that politics is so unpredictable at the moment, domestically and internationally. Any party that spends its time thinking about what it might do in all sorts of different scenarios after the general election is probably going to do really badly this side of it.”

Nevertheless, Cooper seems to hold the key to alliance-making: she is visibly popular among her opponents. When we meet, she is approached – at one point embraced – by Tory and Labour MPs in the gardens of the House of Commons. The sporting metaphors play on: “In politics, I like a bit of argy bargy, a bit of cut and thrust,” she says. “But I always think you should play the ball, not the man. Every person here is a human being who has got a family, caring responsibilities. It’s a good thing in a workplace and in politics to try and get on with folk – even if you vehemently disagree with them on important points.”

Split and abolish

Her soft-edged amenability belies what is a hard policy position: Daisy Cooper is the Treasury spokeswoman who wants to abolish her own department. Its split personality – each persona conflicting with the other – means the premier business department should be not one ministry, but two, she says.

“The Treasury does too much,” Cooper tells Director. “When your role is in economic policy and public spending, short-term tax grabs always win out. Those tax grabs always end up overriding and undermining long-term economic growth.”

Cooper would split the Treasury into a Department for Growth and a Department for Public Spending, each independent of the other. The Grand Dame of 1 Horse Guards Road would no longer be asked to ride two ponies. “Why not have a Department for Growth?” says Cooper. “Its mandate could not be clearer – it is there in its title. It would align tax policy with infrastructure policy with investment policy, everything pulling in the same direction. It would be a one-stop shop for businesses and investors.”

A key role of the Department for Growth, she says, would be to create clear priorities on economic development: identify the major projects that are ripe for investment. A government that has myriad priorities for strategic infrastructure, she argues, has no priorities at all. “On the website of the Office for Investment, there’s close to 300 projects listed!” she says. “So, if you’re an investor looking to invest in a low-risk, long-term project that has government backing, how on earth do you know which one to pick? Investors say to me, ‘We want a government that says, “We’ve got three projects – and these are the three that we’re going to deliver.”’ If government signals a direction, capital almost always follows.”

Cooper’s favoured trio of projects is East West Rail (a new line between Oxford and Cambridge); the completion of HS2; and a programme to improve energy connectivity with continental Europe. She is unconvinced by the case for airport expansion: “It can’t be done within existing climate emissions limits,” she says. “There is work going on to look at sustainable aviation fuel. If there are technological changes that enable this to be done, then let’s have that conversation. But the onus is on the airports to demonstrate that they can expand in a way that will produce the highly paid jobs that they claim it’s going to – and that they can do it within the climate emissions framework that we need to stay within.”

Global goodwill

This avowed internationalist might resist aviation expansion, yet she nevertheless wants Britain to spread its wings. Characteristically for a Liberal Democrat, she is passionately Europhilic. She worries that what she terms the “tweet diplomacy” of former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss has undermined trust with the UK’s neighbours, such that transcontinental projects that could bolster growth and energy security remain a distant dream.

Direct high-speed rail links from the UK to Milan, Cologne, Frankfurt and other key mercantile cities require cooperation beyond that which exists now. “When you want to go into negotiations on infrastructure, it requires a basic level of trust – people thinking that you’re going into those negotiations with goodwill,” she says. “It is an absolute prerequisite for any kind of economic conversation about infrastructure. We would like there to be far more cooperation on transport projects and on energy. There are huge opportunities there for us in driving down bills, getting economic growth, improving sustainable travel. But first, they require a political commitment to work with European allies and neighbours in a productive way.”

Despite this, she remains equivocal about the government’s European Partnership Bill for dynamic alignment, which seeks to smooth cross-border trade by removing discrepancies in product standards between the EU and UK across a raft of sectors.

“It seems to me as though what they’re going to do is bring this bill forward, but without allowing any scrutiny of the secondary legislation,” she says. “Now I’m pro-European, but I also believe that the British Parliament should have a say. It could be very dangerous if the government is trying to do a reset, but doesn’t allow our own parliament to have any say on the secondary legislation. It could lead to some big disasters. This government is not very good at negotiating. When Starmer went to Europe and came back with his deal, he absolutely shafted some communities when he didn’t need to. Having a stronger deal with Europe – getting a better relationship with Europe – is a priority, but there are questions about how you do it.”

Securing startups

Closer to home, Cooper prudently declines to be drawn on policy detail three years out from a general election. Yet she offers hints on startups and retail – two areas where she suggests the government has failed. “We are a very entrepreneurial country, right?” she says. “It’s deep in our history and our culture. And we rightly celebrate the fact that we are one of the startup capitals of the world. But, as an American said to me, ‘You always fatten the veal.’ That meant we are great at startups, but as soon as those firms get to a certain size, they’re poached by other countries that offer them amazing packages to go abroad, where they suddenly scale… There are two issues – one is the tax burden, the other is accessing the funding. There is an opportunity to look at tax relief to make sure startups can stay here.”

Cooper has been campaigning for the reform of business rates, she says, “for longer than I’ve been a member of Parliament”. Her seat, St Albans, has a thriving centre. Other towns and cities are less fortunate. Traditionally, the relative affluence of high streets has been framed as a symptom of local consumer confidence. Yet Cooper sees it, too, as a cause.

“High streets are so important,” she says. “A lot of everyday folk who have busy, complicated lives don’t follow GDP stats, don’t follow unemployment statistics – sometimes they don’t even follow interest rates. They just walk out of their front door, they take one look at their high street, and if it’s looking good, they’ve got confidence that the economy is working. But if there are empty shops and it’s downtrodden… people generally think that the economy isn’t working for their area.

“It’s a real litmus test of confidence in the economy, and in the system. And that is why I am so determined that we will be the party of the high street. Part of that is around business rates, because it’s a very outdated system that penalises bricks-and-mortar businesses.”

Cooper knows the streets of which she speaks. The Horn isn’t the only watering hole in St Albans to enjoy her company. The city, she claims, “has more pubs per square mile than anywhere else in the UK. People wanted to come to London to sell their wares. They would stop overnight with the horses in St Albans. So we’ve got loads of beautiful pubs. And as a result of that, I am a campaigner to save pubs.”

Hertfordshire’s hostelries might be thankful for her support. Yet they might never hear her dulcet tones again. “I am not a keen singer,” she admits. Some other musical star-turn perhaps? “I play the piano, I play the violin,” she says. She reaches for a silver tankard from an All Party Parliamentary Group on Beer: “But I did also win an award for being pub parliamentarian of the year in 2024 – so that gives you an insight into what I do after work.”