Balls beef up Gordon Brown’s Cabinet

Yvette Cooper's promotion from housing minister to chief secretary to the Treasury in the wake of Peter Hain's resignation has established the first husband and wife team in a British Cabinet. Cooper is married to children's secretary Ed Balls, Gordon Brown's closest political ally. Cooper (left) will be second in command to Chancellor Alistair Darling, strengthening by nepotism the Brownite grip on government.

Her promotion comes despite recent criticism of the botched introduction of the 'home information packs' at her old department. A Labour-dominated Commons select committee lambasted Cooper's handling of the affair, saying it was "another failure of delivery on [the department's] part, and the reasons for that failure lie in poor preparation and a retreat by the department's ministerial team".

Cooper and Balls have had remarkably similar career trajectories. Both are former economics journalists - he at the Financial Times and she at the Independent - and have neighbouring constituencies in Yorkshire (Normanton and Pontefract respectively). Cooper became a Labour MP at the 1997 election while her husband was economics adviser to Gordon Brown. They married in 1998 before Ed became chief economics adviser to the Treasury. He followed his wife into Parliament at the 2005 election.

The couple now have to deal with a childcare nightmare - they have two girls and a boy, all aged under nine. On the bright side, Cooper will no longer appear in lists of Wags (wives and girlfriends of famous men) as she did recently when the Daily Mail clubbed her together with Samantha Cameron, Dave's wife, and Gabriella Irimia, the Romanian 'Cheeky Girl' friend of the Lib Dems' Lembit Opik, in a list of 'Westminster Wags'. ·