A clip from a 2018 comedy show has been circulating in Westminster – and it neatly explains why the spotlight landed on Wes Streeting when No 10 launched its preemptive strikes against potential leadership candidates.
It features a number of fresh-faced politicians – from Jess Phillips to Johnny Mercer – who are asked who will be prime minister in 10 years. Several Labour MPs dutifully say the then-leader Jeremy Corbyn. Tim Loughton, a former Tory MP, predicts Kemi Badenoch. The final clip is Wes Streeting, who smiles and says: “I think it will probably be me.”
Streeting has been talked about as a future prime minister since he was leader of the National Union of Students. So in theory, it’s no surprise that the health secretary was the name who was first connected to briefings from No 10 about how fiercely Keir Starmer would fight a leadership battle.
Even the morning broadcast round after a day of negative stories, Streeting looked as if he was enjoying himself, compare himself to the Celebrity Traitors’ wronged faithful Joe Marler.
“I think it’s fair to say it would take a lot to make a cabinet minister turn up in that situation,” one ally said. “Wes would never duck it.”
But despite his oft-stated ambitions, the stories would still have left a lot of casual viewers thinking: where is this coming from?
Why did some allies of the prime minister convince themselves that an outwardly loyal cabinet minister was not merely ambitious but plotting a coup? Streeting and MPs who would be considered his close allies say there is no such plot.
But there are reasons for suspicion. Since the welfare vote, a grim consensus has been forming that Starmer cannot meet the moment, often described by MPs as the “progressive emergency” of taking the fight to Nigel Farage.
Some in Westminster had alighted on Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester.
Streeting’s communication skills are often remarked upon, but it was thought he faced a substantial hurdle in winning the votes of the membership, coming, as he does, far more from the traditional Blairite wing of the party than Starmer. He once told a shadow cabinet meeting: “Every day, we should drag a sacred cow of our party to the town market place and slaughter it”.
He has been outspoken about the need for partnerships with private providers to help clear the NHS backlog. He was a fierce and outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, especially regarding allegations of antisemitism. And he infuriated many trans rights supporters in the party for his decision to ban puberty blockers for under-18s.
But there are three factors in his favour. First, his two biggest rivals are significantly hamstrung: Burnham by the practicality of not having a parliamentary seat and Angela Rayner by her recent resignation – though it has been long rumoured that the pair may try to thrash out some kind of pact.
Second, the Labour membership is now very different. Labour has shed tens of thousands of voters on its left, many dissatisfied with the Starmer government. Those who remain are more moderate. On the LabourList cabinet rankings, Streeting is in the middle of the pack, not great, but not terrible.
Third – and most crucially – Streeting has been making deliberate efforts in recent months to tack to the left, especially on issues such as Palestine and on anti-racism, two issues which he feels very strongly about and can speak authentically.
On Gaza he has been the government’s most outspoken voice, calling for a Palestinian state and harsher sanctions on Israel, though part of this is necessary because of his Ilford North seat, where he came within a whisker of losing to the independent leftwing candidate Leanne Mohamad.
Allies of Streeting point specifically to his outspokenness on Gaza as a moment where relations with Starmer began to get frostier.
But it is not the only area where he has been making new interventions, ones that have caught the attention of No 10, where Streeting has been routinely outflanking the prime minister.
He has spoken in cabinet meetings against the government’s approach to welfare and digital ID, as well as saying publicly that Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech on immigration was a mistake, alongside the attempts to cut winter fuel allowances and welfare. It is a signal about how a Streeting administration might look.
And he has identified an aggravation within the parliamentary party that No 10 is frustratingly slow at responding to Reform UK, particularly on race. He made a pointed intervention in September, after the weekend of the mass far-right rally in London, suggesting Labour needed to radically step up its defence of minorities.
Streeting abandoned a planned speech at the NHS England LGBTQ+ health conference, saying he wanted to address “the elephant in the room” and said he understood why some were questioning “whether this government is really on our side”.
It was also an attack on what had been a government line-to-take – that the protests showed free speech was alive in Britain. “Free speech, that is, unless that freedom includes the right to worship a different God, or the right to march through central London protesting atrocities in Gaza or the right just to walk down Oxford Street without being called the P-word, the N-word, or having your hijab ripped off,” he said.
Friends of the health secretary say like many Labour members, Labour MPs and progressives across the country, he has been intensely frustrated with the lack of clarity of response by No 10 to this threat from the far right and Reform. This is truly what he believes, one said, and he won’t wait for lines to take.
If anything now, Streeting is even more emboldened to say what he thinks.
