SAJID Javid, if he is remembered at all, will probably be remembered only as the answer to a particularly geeky pub quiz question.
Wes Streeting is facing the same fate. The similarities are striking: health secretaries who resigned, ostensibly on principle, in protest over prime ministers whose time was up.
I was struck with the thought of Javid while watching Streeting’s resignation speech this week. Streeting failed to draw nearly as big a crowd as his predecessor-but-five. He looked like a spent force.
He will be keen to avoid Javid's fate of decided obscurity and now appears to be pitching himself not as a leader but as a major player in a future Andy Burnham government.
His allies believe he won’t fight against Burnham if the Greater Manchester mayor is elected to Parliament and challenges Keir Starmer for the premiership, according to a report in The Times.
This was rubbished by one source “close to Streeting”, but it would likely be the sensible course of action.
Polling suggests that Burnham is a dead cert to become PM if he wins a seat in the Commons. Streeting’s potential leadership bid would likely be consigned to an embarrassing footnote in that contest, just as Javid’s was in the 2022 Tory race (he dropped out just moments before nominations closed).
Politically, there is not a million miles between Burnham and Streeting and Scots will not expect a huge amount to change whoever replaces Starmer.
What is more interesting is Streeting’s political journey, to put it politely, over the last few months.
He once derided “middle-class lefties” who would object to the use of private companies in the NHS. Now, faced with the reality that the Labour membership is stuffed with “middle-class lefties”, Streeting must change tack.
In his resignation speech, he spoke wistfully of how the “nurse from Nigeria is not the enemy of the factory worker in Newcastle”, the social solidarity that is the basis of the health service and how refugees were “not responsible for the cost of living crisis”.
For a man who served in a government which accepted the basic premise of Nigel Farage’s complaints about immigration, if not the way he voiced them, it seemed an extraordinary turnaround.
More remarkable still was his call for a “wealth tax that works” as he set out his vision for a system where capital gains tax was brought into line with income tax.
Could it be that the man with a majority of just 528 in Ilford North is worried about losing his seat to a left-wing challenger come the next election?
Of course he is, but he is also eyeing up his future prospects. Streeting pre-resignation would be viewed as simply too right-wing for whatever he imagines Burnham has planned. Streeting post-resignation is hoping for a swift return to the Cabinet under the new boss.
Leadership might be off the cards for now, but he’ll hope this plan will help him escape the obscurity into which Javid fell after his dramatic resignation speech just over four years ago.
