While Harold Wilson’s quip about a week being a long time in politics has long had the status of cliché, it really has been a long six months since Wes Streeting last sat down for an interview with the New Statesman. At the time of our Christmas issue, he was a cabinet minister of such note that nerve-shredded No 10 operatives were briefing the papers about his supposed plots to topple Keir Starmer, despite his protestations of loyalty.
Now he is out in the cold after a dramatic resignation. The accoutrements of office are gone too. A small gang of lieutenants remains by his side, but two of his special advisers have stayed on at the Department of Health and Social Care to advise his successor, James Murray. He has lost the ministerial car and travels happily by Tube. The crisp suit and tie have been replaced with the uniform of the backbench maverick: jeans, open-necked shirt, a crumpled blazer and quarter-zip sweater.
Out of government, he is more candid than ever about what he calls “the existential crisis for Labour”. He resigned after deciding that Starmer was not only unable to get the Labour Party out of this crisis, but that he was among its major causes (and told him so on his way out of the door). He has transformed from one of the government’s most eloquent defenders on the media round to a fierce critic. Take this, for example, one of many brutal put-downs made during our conversation, which took place shortly after the resignation of John Healey: “[Starmer] says he takes responsibility. I don’t think he does, actually. I don’t think he’s taken responsibility or even acknowledged what happened to good Labour people who lost their seats in May. And I don’t think he has taken responsibility for gripping this Defence Investment Plan.”
Such vertiginous changes of position come instinctively to a man who has a feel for politics. When I ask about his falling out with Starmer, by way of explanation he shares with me his own neat theory of Labour’s electoral history: “Whenever we find ourselves in opposition, it is usually because of one or a combination of three questions about Labour. Do you have the right leadership? Can you be trusted with the money? Can you be trusted with our security? And if the answer to any one of those three questions is ever ‘no’, Labour loses.”
In his view, the May elections showed a “resounding” rejection of Starmer’s leadership. Streeting is not happy with Labour’s economic programme either; he recently floated reversing the hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions introduced by Rachel Reeves in her first Budget (to raise money, partly, for Streeting’s own health spending envelope). Now, after the resignation of Healey and Al Carns, he awards Starmer an emphatic “fail” rating on all three questions because his credibility on defence is shot. He derides the Defence Investment Plan affair as a monument to Starmer’s “poor leadership, poor judgement and bad politics”.
But Streeting is not all gloom. “I’ve always been a glass-half-full optimist. I genuinely think there’s a way out of this,” he says. And the best way out for Labour, he believes, is for him to become its leader and the next prime minister.
The precipitous collapse of the Labour government’s internal structures as well as its public support has led to a smug satisfaction among the party’s enemies. All the worldview assumptions of your average Tory duffer have been given new life – socialists are crap at politics and rubbish at running the economy. Their evidence is simple: read the papers.
Though the forces of reaction have their own problems – deciding whether to rally around one leader (Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage) or destroy each other in the crossfire – all seem convinced Labour is finished, perhaps forever. Streeting says no. “This is Labour’s time. This is a social democratic moment,” he claims, citing the rise of AI as a “fourth Industrial Revolution” that will soon “change every aspect of work and living”. “We have to demonstrate that the party that was founded in the aftermath of the first and second Industrial Revolutions to balance the interest of labour against capital, then has a relevant purpose now in an age of automated capital.”
At this juncture, he foresees a near future in which the party could descend into civil war. But “there is an alternative way,” Streeting says: one “which sees a leadership contest as being one among friends who broadly agree”. He wants to “wage a battle of ideas, and engage that battle of ideas in a way which is open and generous to each other and helps the Labour Party to come through this stronger, not weaker”.
His answer is transparency and solidity, and in this sense he is setting himself up as the opposite of the Starmer project. Despite serving in the shadow cabinet and government, he now raises no objection to the notion that the Starmer leadership campaign was dishonest (the “ten pledges” to the Labour membership that were dropped before the general election were testament to this) and intellectually dilute. In contrast, Streeting promises to say exactly what he would do, regardless of how bracing Labour’s internal party selectorate might find it. He says that in a leadership election he will not engage in “an auction of the most popular and expensive policies”, taking a dig at Burnham’s recent 24-hour U-turn on compensation for the Waspi women. “I always think honesty is the best policy,” he says, even if that means upsetting people.
What does he really think? “My theory on growth is quite simple. How do you grow an economy? You push the frontier of innovation. And actually, Britain’s got a good starting point on this. We punch way above our weight in the world.” His notion of letting the economy rip and enjoying the fruits of growth will inevitably run up against Burnham’s question in a leadership debate: growth for whom?
Streeting says that “there is a big opportunity through reindustrialisation, whether that’s investing in our defence, investing in our energy security and the race to renewables, whether that’s investing in new data centres”. He reckons this will bring “good, decent, well-paid and sustainable jobs” to Britain’s young unemployed and to its deprived towns.
As a torch-bearer for his party’s New Right tradition, Streeting is keen for Labour to start talking about the benefits of immigration as part of his economic approach. Under Starmer, many on this wing of the party have been privately frustrated about a Prime Minister and Chancellor who spoke about growth as a “number-one priority” but seemed happy to take an economic hit in order to flaunt lower net migration numbers to the public. “Yes, we need to control our borders,” says Streeting, “yes, we need to deal with the boats, but we should also send a message that Britain is open to the best talent, especially at a time when the Trump administration is fairly anti-science. We should be going out there and actively recruiting those scientists, those technologists in the States who have the potential to be the next Nobel Prize winners and get them here in Britain and scout the rest of the world. So I’d go harder on a global talent programme, aim to get 20,000 of the most talented people in our country, here, working in Britain – helping to create our growth.”
He has been hawking ideas from far and wide, too. He thinks Britain’s defence ills could be solved by joining multilateral projects such as the proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, a scheme for defence loans among friendly democratic countries. He’s been thinking about raising money from Brits with savings and investments through the issuing of inheritance-tax-free defence bonds. Recently, Streeting has been looking into Denmark’s “flexicurity” model of welfare. In Britain it would mean a more flexible labour market and welfare safety net in return for, he hopes, higher growth and productivity. “If you lose your job, you’ve got a stronger set of income protections, and then you’ve got an active labour market policy so that you’re investing in education skills, lifelong learning. When people fall out of work, there’s more active and rapid support to get them into work.”
Streeting’s guiding belief on the economy is that “the Labour Party is at its best when you realise that you have to be both pro wealth creation as well as pro wealth distribution”. He is also slowly turning his guns on Ed Miliband’s net zero push. Farage has said repeatedly that the issue will end up being the new Brexit, dividing traditional Labour voters who want lower bills from the party’s more climate conscious metropolitan supporters. In a speech on 16 June, Streeting seemed to agree, saying if net zero were “delivered on the backs of the poor and working people’s jobs” it would put Farage in No 10.
Streeting is bubbling with ideas, some of which he set out years ago in obscure pamphlets. He has felt like a man with a zipped-up mouth since 2024. So many of these debates have not been had for the sake of party unity and, more often, control-freakery at the centre. But pressure must have an outlet and we are now witnessing it as Labour prepares for its “battle of ideas”. The resignations of Healey and Carns show, he thinks, that “this is not a government open to ideas. This is not a government that is willing to draw on expertise.” He says “good ministers” have been treated poorly and told to keep shtum.
Streeting’s complaints are numerous. But if Starmer is replaced before the autumn, his successor will be travelling headlong into political storms. This year’s Budget will be the first fiscal event to take account of the economic effects of the Iran war. Prime minister Streeting would soon, like prime minister Burnham, face miserable decisions that could poison any honeymoon in public opinion. Just as the May 2026 election results dealt a possibly fatal blow to Starmer’s authority, his successor will face a similar test in May 2027, when many councils won by Labour at its high watermark of popularity in 2023 come up for election. A second beating in the polls, despite a change of leader, could unravel party morale entirely.
Streeting presents himself as a “conviction politician” who can withstand these challenges and take the party with him. While some have carped that his increasingly vocal views on war crimes abroad and “open racism” at home, along with a more open stance on greater wealth taxes, are calculated to woo Labour members, Streeting pleads consistency. He has noted, for example, that his dossier of atrocities in Gaza, collated by him from the testimony of British doctors and shared with the cabinet, was not briefed or leaked for political points at the time; it only emerged with the Mandelson files. (Mandelson said Streeting’s position on Gaza suggested he was “experiencing an early mid-life crisis”.)
On the other hand, he admits that he is also a “career politician”, which he says is no bad thing – despite the common complaint that such people are shallow. “As if politics is unlike any other profession and it is a bad thing to have built experience. I think it is a strength… that in my early twenties I was leading a national organisation, the National Union of Students, cut my teeth in that environment, having to learn how to lead people, to manage people, to make arguments, to prosecute change.” Perhaps professional politicians are what Labour and the country really needs? It’s an argument that won’t sing on the doorstep, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Streeting seems to think the fashion for being the outsider and the gentlemen amateur in politics is fading with Starmer’s fortunes. The pair entered parliament at the 2015 election (there is a picture of them sitting together on the green benches as “freshers” on their first week as MPs). But since then, their paths have diverged. As the circumstances of politics became harder, Starmer sought greater refuge in his contempt for politics and Westminster.
Streeting is determined not to be an ideologically empty vessel like the Prime Minister, who once said there would be no such thing as “Starmerism”. While the other major figures on the political scene have clear intellectual influences – Badenoch has Thomas Sowell where Margaret Thatcher had Friedrich Hayek, while Farage upholds the tradition of Powellism – I wonder where Streeting locates himself. He reaches immediately for the legacy of Anthony Crosland and the revisionist tradition. He tells me that The Future of Socialism, Crosland’s 1956 call for a good society built on social equality, “doesn’t feel dated even in the third decade of the 21st century”. RH Tawney’s notions of Christian socialism also “speaks to me and my values and my faith”.
He is also keen to remind me of the political talent within the new intake of Labour MPs. Many of them came from the maligned worlds of think-tanking, lobbying and advisory roles. They could make him prime minister. They might form the backbone of a future Streeting government. This pool of young and successful parliamentary supporters is all more evidence, for the Streeting camarilla, that he is the coming man of British politics, not Andy Burnham, who has taken up Starmer’s anti-Westminster approach with a regional twang. A critic might say it shows Streeting is the Roy Jenkins of the 2020s: more glamorous, more sociable and more intelligent than his rivals, but doomed never to wear the crown.
Of his crusade to modernise the country and simply be better at politics than Starmer, he says: “The tragedy is, I look around the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party. There are loads of our ministers and loads of our backbenchers who have the same instincts and have felt actively discouraged from generating new ideas or being prepared to go out and make those arguments.”
Consequently, there is now a “grotesque caricature of the Parliamentary Labour Party” that is an indecisive and timid force. Streeting blames the U-turns and “poor leadership” at the top for this, rather than the MPs. He thinks he can unite them with a bit of iron resolve. “They want to know that if they’re out there making the Labour case and taking on some of those difficult arguments that they’re not going to find the next day that the government has U-turned and they’re left out there on the field… looking daft because they were sent out to make the case that the government itself didn’t believe in. So there’s lots that needs to change about leadership, about policy, and about the culture, about the way we build on the strengths of the whole team,” he says. “We could descend into petty factionalism or we can recognise that the different tribes and political traditions of the Labour Party have historically been a strength.”
It must be obvious to Streeting that with his views and his record, he is far from a favourite to win over Labour’s Party selectorate in a leadership contest. He was the health secretary who, yes, brought down waiting times. He was also the health secretary who spent months in deadlock with the unions over doctors’ pay, who abolished NHS England and triggered consequent redundancy rounds across the country, and who welcomed private sector participation – including by the US tech giant Palantir – in the service. This, from his perspective, is all evidence that he was willing to take on vested interests and show leadership. “There are vested interests everywhere, and your job as a politician is to confront those [in order to] advance the national interest. And that is absolutely the leadership that I’m prepared to show.” If he were PM, house building is one area he cites as a target for his attacks on vested interests.
If he fails, either to replace Starmer or to trigger the contest that makes way for another successor, Streeting believes the picture will look bleak – for his party and the country. “At the heart of these challenges is poor leadership, poor judgement and bad politics. And unless that changes, we will give this country to Nigel Farage and he will walk into Downing Street at the next general election. And I do not want that on my conscience.”
[Further reading: Wes Streeting on Keir Starmer’s “poor leadership, poor judgement and bad politics”]
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