Spring is just around the corner. Unless you’re Yvette Cooper, of course. As a former home secretary whose major achievement was misapplying the law it was her job to uphold, her winter – and it’s truly one for the record books – has only just begun.

After all, Cooper, and Cooper alone, is responsible for the proscription- ruled unlawful on Friday (though the ban remains, for now, in place) – of Palestine Action in July last year. That’s seven months in which Labour went from big tent politics to the big top, one filled with coppers in clown cars banging up pensioners, priests and the progeny of Holocaust survivors.

Since then, though, Cooper’s learned a lesson from the boss, prime minister Keir Starmer. It was on the Sunday morning politics shows that she put that education into action, trotting out what’s fast become Labour’s only consistent message: it weren’t me, guv.

“I followed the clear advice and recommendations,” Cooper told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday morning, “going through a serious process that the Home Office goes through”. Who gave her that advice? “Different agencies,” she gestured. “Police advice as well.”

As long ago as – checks notes – last weekend, Downing Street adviser Morgan McSweeney took the blame for Starmer’s ambassadorial appointment of Peter Mandelson, “best pal” to billionaire child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A very successful strategy, it turns out, with the prime minister (almost unbelievably) still in charge of the country. By blaming advisers for her own snafu, Cooper is simply following the prime minister’s suit.

The fish, they say, rots from the head. I guess the brass neck comes next.

Ministers are, of course, correct to take advice. Only a fool would limit an entire population’s right to publicly utter certain sentences, under threat of a terror charge, without asking someone else if it was a good idea. But let’s be real. Even if that advice was “hell yeah!”, only a fool would take it without applying a little critical thinking of their own.

Cooper does appear to have been given the go-ahead by the government’s Proscription Review Group (PRG) in March last year. But the advice on which that recommendation was based was laughable. MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) based its assessment that the group should be proscribed on three incidents of “serious property damage” to arms factories. That’s less than 1% of the group’s nearly 400 actions.

Cooper, though, is a politician. No surprise she took her big swing just after the government had been forced into a humiliating walk back on its pledge to further immiserate the disabled. It needed – desperately – a win, and Cooper was just the woman to lose it.

In keeping with other Labour disasters, Cooper showed little care for the impact of her decision on ordinary people. Time and again, the government has proved there is no human cost too high for a political victory. Freezing pensioners, impoverished kids, the girls abused by a billionaire rapist and his mates? Chuck on a match, the polls need cooking.

Now add people of political conscience up and down the land. Some 2,700 of them have so far been arrested under counter-terror law for words written on paper, with hundreds charged with terrorism offences. Cooper would have happily seen them criminalised as terrorists, their employment, travel and reputational futures curtailed, with potentially lengthy prison sentences for some.

And happy too, along with her successor Shabana Mahmood, to watch police resources tied up, month after month, dragging the bodies of peaceful protesters to the vans. Two Labour home secretaries in a row appear to have calculated that the safety of ordinary Brits, abandoned by distracted police forces at a cost of £10 million, was a small price to pay to keep Israeli arms companies happy.

Both home secretaries should now be asking: was it worth it? For Mahmood, it’s hard to see how defending Cooper’s errors through lengthy appeals and perhaps further cases in the Supreme and European courts, could have any personal interest. If Cooper can’t even take responsibility for her own mistakes, why would Mahmood want to?

Mahmood should follow the lead of the British press too, scrambling to get on the right side of history now that the wind has changed. In a departure from a more tepid editorial line, the Guardian described the defeat as “a humiliating blow for ministers” on Friday. The Times called the ban “excessive”, urging ministers to move on. Even the Telegraph thinks the proscription now looks “ridiculous”.

Novara Media has, of course, been on the side of free speech all along. We’ve been on the ground at the protests, speaking to hundreds of those holding signs. Police officers told us their own concerns about the ban, while our questions to the government went unanswered. From our early public statement against proscription, to interventions on behalf of journalism as a whole, we’ve been clear about its stupidity. Our archive of articles, podcasts and video reports remains a permanent testament to that position.

“It weren’t me, guv,” may now be Cooper’s position on the ban. But I’m proud to say of our reporting: guv, it were us all along.

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