Wes Streeting: the UK’s next prime minister?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, is West Streeting plotting to become the next Prime Minister?

0:20He's often described as the best communicator the Labour front bench has. Friends, we are in the fight of our lives, not just for the NHS or even for the survival of this government, but for everything we believe in. Slick, ambitious, always ready to put himself in the media spotlight. When we get things wrong and we will make mistakes because human beings are fallible, you've got two choices. You can either plough on in the wrong direction because you want to spare your blushes, or you can listen, accept you've got it wrong and put it right. How much do people really know what West Streeting's about?

1:03He does do vision. What some of his critics say is that he does not think things through carefully enough before then going on to pursue them. The rumours have been swirling for months. Briefings that the health secretary was trying to stage a coup against Keir Starmer. Virm at denials from Camp's treating and his insistence that he absolutely isn't. This prime minister is a man of decency and integrity. And we will all be putting our shoulders to the wheel as a team to support him.

1:40But in a week where Starmer has had a serious wobble, The chapter in Westminster now isn't about whether West Streeting will make a bid for the leadership. The question really is, when? From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, who is West Streeting? And could he become the next Labour leader?

2:08Kieran Stacey, welcome back to Today in Focus. Now, it has been quite the week for the Prime Minister. He was pushed to the brink of his leadership and has managed to survive, you know, for now. Meanwhile, of course, his rivals are circling. And one in particular has been making quite the splash this week. West Streeting. What's he been up to? As you say, this week has been quite tumultuous for the Prime Minister. He lost his chief of staff on Sunday. He then lost his director of communications, Tim Allen, on Monday morning. Then on Monday afternoon, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anna Sawa, came out and said he wanted Keir Starmer to resign.

2:49We were all wondering whether this was the beginning of a coup attempt. That coup attempt we thought might be focused around West Streeting, Keir Starmer's most obvious leadership rival. I can tell you at that time, West Streeting was in a Sky News studio recording an interview at which he was actually giving his backing to the PM. I think Keir Starmer has shown through his actions and words in the last week in relation to the Mandelson scandal that he is going to be transparent about the decision making. And I think people should give him a hearing. He then came out and published a series of text messages that he had had with Peter Mandelson over a reasonably long period of time.

3:31And then pretty much all hell broke, please. I have heard that the view within cabinet, some in the cabinet, was that Anasawa was working in conjunction with Wes Streeting and Anasawa was expecting there to be some lower rung government resignations. His allies say that while he may not have been in cahoots with Anasawa, he certainly is still thinking of trying to challenge the prime minister. So it's all quite febrile here. And the centre of the action arguably is not even the Prime Minister. It is the Health Secretary West Streeting. Now, you talked about those texts that he published, his exchanges with Peter Mandelson.

4:11And that was one of the big stories this week. And he's tried to get ahead of that. Kieran, what was the most surprising thing to you that came out of those exchanges? So, of course, all this started with the revelation in the Epstein files in the US that Peter Mandelson, the former US ambassador and mentor to West Streeting, had a much closer relationship than previously realised with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. That then put a lot of pressure on a few people, one of whom was West Streeting, who has long had a close relationship with Peter Mandelson. Because of this, there were multiple reports over the weekend about exactly what the messages between the pair of them might say.

4:47and that is why West Streeting says he wanted to get out there and show everybody what they actually do say. I published my messages because I have nothing to hide and after a weekend of frankly smear and innuendo I felt it important to put them out there. I always think sunlight is the best disinfectant and there it is for people to read and see. First of all I would say just the regularity of which the two men were communicating shows you that this was a close friendship. I mean, they're ideological fellow travellers. They're both from the right of the Labour Party. They both really dislike the left of the party and have kind of seen it as their life's work to oust the left of the Labour Party from the levers of power.

5:28And so they are constantly in discussions about things that have nothing to do with either West Streeting's day job as health secretary or Peter Mandelson's day job as US ambassador. They're talking about political strategy. They're talking about what's happening in Downing Street. You know, a couple of things stood out to me. First of all, West Streeting admits in here, And this is one piece of evidence into how close their relationship was. But he admits to Peter Mandelson that he thinks he is, quote unquote, toast in his own seat in Ilford. He thinks he's not going to get re-elected at the next election.

5:57That was quite surprising. He also has quite an extended conversation about the rights and wrongs of recognizing the state of an independent Palestine. They talk about strategy. There's one moment where they talk about the government's growth strategy. and West Streeting just says there is no growth strategy. So it's all quite revealing. Revealing of a close friendship, of a kind of indiscreet friendship where they would quite happily say things critical of themselves to a certain extent, but also critical of the Prime Minister. So it's fair to say Mandelson, close friend, mentor, and then you hear West Streeting on the Today programme making absolute clear distance between him and Mandelson.

6:37Peter Mandelson has been a friend of yours, hasn't he? Is he still? No. And I wonder what that and his performance this week tells you about how West Streeting operates. Well, he is political to his fingertips and he is a canny media operator. I think what it tells us is that he wanted to get these messages out to boost his own reputation. But it has been widely seen as clearing the decks ahead of a possible leadership pitch, maybe in the next few weeks, maybe later this year. His allies insist this is not the case, that Wes Streeting had been so upset by some of the coverage about these text messages over the weekend that he just wanted to get out there and, you know, have everybody seize them and judge them for themselves.

7:21Now, to do that, he violated several norms. I think the idea had been that Number 10 would oversee the release of all these documents in conjunction with Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee. Basically, Wes Streeting did an end run around all of those organisations, Now, this is very much true to character for him. He is someone who, if he wants to achieve something, will go and do it. And he actually gets quite frustrated at the Prime Minister for not doing this, by being too obsessed by process, by getting bogged down in the detail of things, rather than just going out and doing what he thinks is right.

7:55So this is a very characteristically West Streeting way of behaving.

8:05Kieran, can we go back a bit in Streeting's story? Where does it begin? Where does he grow up? Yeah, he grows up in relative poverty in Stepney in East London in the 1980s. I remember my fourth birthday. Normally kids would bring in a cake and some sweets and I came in with nothing. And there was an expectation from my friends we'd be celebrating my birthday. And that was the first time I thought, I don't have something that I should have brought in. His mum was actually born in prison. His maternal grandfather was a habitual criminal who was acquainted with the Cray twins. She was 18 when she had Wes streeting.

8:39His father was 17. The relationship didn't last. That was an accident. Yeah. My mum was under a lot of pressure from everyone to have an abortion. And she had the appointment booked. on the day she was due to go in she decided she wasn't going to go through with it she knew he's spoken in interviews about his memories of being cockroaches at home in an empty fridge blackouts when money ran out of the electricity meter he said he was embarrassed at being on free school meals so it was very much a kind of working class quite impoverished council estate background his paternal grandfather was a bit more stable but a traditional working class blue collar tory voter So, you know, his family certainly comes from the right of politics and that's what he grew up around.

9:25And how much do you think that early life has informed his politics now? Very much. He will talk about it in those terms. He will say, look, I identify with strivers in society because my family were that. There are lots of people in my family, like my dad, who've managed to work hard, get on the housing ladder and sort of work their way up. Who, you know, when my dad would still say, I think he's working class. They had a real tangible experience of poverty, so they didn't kind of romanticise it in the way that he thinks some on the left do. I don't want kids to grow up experiencing the same sort of poverty and hardships that I experienced growing up.

10:00Certainly my mum and her side of the family experienced growing up. You know, that's one of the reasons why I'm in politics, because I want to make sure that kids from backgrounds like mine have the same chances and choices and opportunities and security that I have now.

10:23I should say that he didn't start off on the right to the Labour Party when he was a young man. He attended a local Labour Party meeting where the guest speaker was Jeremy Corbyn. And people say he was very impressed by Jeremy Corbyn and signed up for Campaign Group News, the kind of socialist newsletter at the time. And someone close to him said he was the original young Corbynister. So he didn't necessarily always come from the right to the Labour Party, But certainly since he's made that move, he has very much tied it back to the background he grew up in. Well, can you tell me a bit more about his political journey?

10:55Because from everything I know about streeting, you know, he has this working class background, as you say. He's gay. He's Christian. He grew up in this poverty. He loved drama and acting by his own admission. And he excels in school, gets into Cambridge. What happens next? Well, after Cambridge, he becomes head of the National Union of Students. I'm national president of the National Union of Students. and I want you to vote yes to NUS because we are the only national voice for students. And when you look at what's happening nationally at the moment, huge debates about fees and whether they should go higher, cuts taking place on campuses up and down the country.

11:29There has never been a more important time for a strong and powerful national voice for students. And I remember this period of time because I was a student at that time. And the big battle going on at that point was tuition fees. And this was while Tony Blair was in power. and the government was imposing tuition fees for the first time. Immensely controversial with a whole generation of students who were paying these fees for the first time. He expected the NUS to get on board with that battle and to fight back against the government. In fact, West Streeting was quite open to the idea of tuition fees and advocated a completely different funding model for the entire sector.

12:04And there was a huge battle, I remember, at the time between him as leader of the NUS and the students who were the members. And there's kind of an early glimpse into the kind of politics he would then pursue for the rest of his career. He went on to work for Progress, the kind of Blairite movement within the Labour Party. He became head of education at Stonewall, the LGBTQ plus movement. He then went to work for PwC as a consultant, working in the public sector side of the business, and then went on to work for the unsuccessful campaign to become Labour candidate for London mayor of Una King, the former Labour MP, who was also herself a Blairite.

12:39So this is actually quite a traditional route into politics for any young, thrusting Blairite like Wes Streeting was at the time. There will be a rare glimmer of sunshine felt here in Ilford North. You can see this labour gain from the Conservative. Wes Streeting, a former president of the NUS, a majority of 589, so pretty tight. But they needed a 6 % swing here and they got it. And so then Streeting was elected to Parliament as MP for Ilford North in 2015. How did he do? Pretty well. I mean, this is maybe the birth of the West Streeting leadership story. 2015 was not an easy election for Labour.

13:19You'll remember, of course, Ed Miliband was leader. Labour had thought they were going to go in and win that election and ended up not doing so. But on quite a difficult night, he won Ilford North, which was a marginal seat. People who know about that race and witnessed it firsthand described a military operation. And he apparently was very, very good at organising local members and getting out the vote and managing to win that seat despite the party suffering losses elsewhere. So when he tells his story about how he can be leader, that will be piece of evidence number one. And then in 2017, his majority is 9 ,000.

13:53He becomes health secretary in 2024. Could you tell me a bit more about that trajectory? As you say, he expands the size of his majority. He makes it into the shadow cabinet first and gets recognised quite quickly as one of the best media communicators in Keir Starmer's team. He has a very different communication style from Keir Starmer himself. He speaks much more bluntly. He's enormously energetic and that kind of infectious enthusiasm, I think, comes across in his interviews. Good morning. Really pleased to be on your new show this morning. How are you feeling? Absolutely fine. I mean, obviously, I'm looking forward to all the questions you're now going to ask me about how we're reinvesting billions.

14:30And he then becomes health secretary. And this is a role in which he can really shine. You know, this is an area that Keir Starmer identified early on as something that he really needed to fix if he was going to win re-election in five years time. And therefore, he put one of his star performers in that role. Now, you said, how has he done as health secretary? Well, that is a really interesting question. Since coming into office, this government has made big strides in fixing our broken NHS. We negotiated an end to the resident doctor's strike within three weeks. We have delivered the two million extra appointments we promised in our first year, and we did it seven months early.

15:10The government will tell you, he will tell you, that things have finally started to turn the corner for the NHS, and there is some evidence for that. so for example the size of the waiting list the overall waiting list has fallen from record levels down to 7.3 million which is the lowest level in three years that is quite some improvement but those figures hide a kind of more complicated picture first of all we should say the performance is patchy so out of about 129 different nhs services in about 31 areas waiting lists have actually gone the other way, have gone backwards. Also, it's become clear in recent weeks that one of the ways that Labour has managed to get the waiting list down is to pay consultants to go through the waiting lists and to find people they don't think should be on it.

15:55Now, in some cases, that's absolutely fair, people who've actually died and so shouldn't be on the waiting list anymore. In other cases, it's people they decide don't need the treatment anymore, so they get taken out of the waiting list. Now, that's quite an expensive way to get a waiting list down. It doesn't actually mean that necessarily anybody's getting their treatment any faster than they would have done. And if you look at projections from health think tanks, they think that the party's main targets for the NHS are likely to be missed by the end of this parliament. Isn't there a suggestion, one of the criticisms being that he is so pro-business that there is this vague sense of privatisation by creep of the NHS under-streeting than would have been traditionally expected of a Labour health secretary?

16:38He's made no secret of the fact that he thinks that treatment should be delivered by the private sector where that makes financial sense. And unions have said that they want it limited far below what he's willing to do. He would say in a very Blairite way, I want to do what works. And if the best use of our money is to get the private sector in to deliver certain services, then he is quite willing to do that. And of course, it almost didn't happen. I mean, I guess potentially the hairiest moment of his career is almost losing his seat in 2024 in Ilford North. What happened? Well, what happened was Gaza happened.

17:13And there were across the country several pro-Gaza independents who did very well in that election. And West Streeting came within just over 500 votes of losing his seat because a pro-Gaza independent there did very, very well. My name is Leanne Mohammed. I am a British-Palestinian who was raised here and currently still lives in Ilford. And as you know, I am standing to be the independent MP for Ilford North. Let's do this. Let's win this for the people of Ilford North, who deserve way better than West Streeting. His seat in Ilford does have a large Muslim population. And so when he's there telling Peter Mandelson in text that he thinks he's toast in his seat, that is exactly why.

17:55But that is certainly a big concern. even among those who support his leadership credentials. Will he actually have a seat to fight from after the next election? Well, Kieran, you've said he's seen as a great media performer. He's eminently contactable. He's friendly with the press. Has he ever actually messed up? What has been a street in gaffe? I mean, he speaks very freely. He speaks in a kind of natural way. And occasionally he'll probably say things that get him into trouble. He called Jeremy Corbyn senile in 2022 and he had to row back on that. He's also got himself into a spot of bother on his position on trans rights.

18:28He initially said that trans women are women and then later said that he regretted saying that. I think we have seen too many examples where with good intentions and particularly in the context of biological sex, trying to be more trans inclusive, certain terms have been changed, but in a way that erases women's identities and women's biology. and also in a way that sometimes even the same document doesn't do the same to men. I think he has kind of been finding his position a little bit on that issue and he's upset quite a lot of trans rights groups in recent times. But generally, I think he's a smooth operator who knows exactly how to talk in quite a real way.

19:21kieran west streeting has been at the center of plenty of stories about plotting against the pm how much you think that's helped or damaged his career prospects he does not like to be identified as being at the center of plots against the prime minister he gets quite upset by it do you think he should be fired for briefing against you i am not going to add to the toxic culture by contributing to the toxic culture and going after individuals. I don't think that is a constructive or positive thing to do. He will absolutely insist, and I think people in Downing Street generally now accept this, that he was not acting in cahoots with Anasawa on Monday.

20:02What I would say, and what we have been reporting in The Guardian over the last few days, is that A, he clearly has leadership ambitions. B, he has a lot of criticisms about the way that government is working. C, if there was a leadership contest, he would definitely stand. And D, and I think this is absolutely crucial, his allies say he does need to act fast to challenge the prime minister. That's for a couple of reasons. One is pure politics, because at the moment, his main possible contender, Angela Rayner, does have something of a cloud hanging over her in terms of the investigation into her tax affairs, but also because, in the words of one of his allies, who said this to me on Tuesday, he said, there is a real risk here.

20:47We just end up meandering along, drifting into a place that pleases us, but where we become increasingly irrelevant, and a reformed government becomes increasingly inevitable. We're streeting, we'll tell you, he really doesn't want any kind of sense of drift to kick in. And I think we should assume that that means if he does feel that he has lost patience with the prime minister, he will act sooner rather than later. How much do you think he just loves the game of it? I think Streeting definitely loves politics. That enthusiasm kind of comes across in every interview. There is always a danger that somebody can look a bit too self-satisfied, a little bit too pleased with themselves as they're playing the game.

21:29But I think it's interesting if you talk to pollsters for example luke trill somebody who conducts both polls and focus groups he would argue that one thing that's really missing in politics at the moment is a sense among party leaders that they're enjoying it that they are actually having fun in the job luke trill would say that is one thing that nigel farosh has in the spades and voters really warm to it and it is also something that west streeting has in spades it's not always a good thing to look desperately serious and like you're hating every day in the job sometimes it's not a bad idea to look like you're in command and having a good time and i think west streeting does project that ah interesting because i know luke trill was quite close friends with west streeting i think they worked together quite closely at stonewall i did speak to actually a couple of people yesterday who had worked with streeting and they said they had the impression of him as someone who worked hard and played hard, loved going to the pub, often quite funny, could likely be looking over your shoulder for someone more important to talk to, but that, you know, he was always the last to leave the party.

22:36Kieran, does that tally with your sense of him? Look, you know, I'm not going to betray any confidences, but I do know that Wes Streeting is a fan of long late nights out. He is a fan of karaoke. He will happily get on the stage and start singing.

22:58He has unbelievable stamina. You will see him out late in the bars at party conferences and then up first thing the next morning. He's always looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. If you speak to some supporters of his, they will say there is a risk here that he could slip into looking unserious. I have seen him during party conference season go round three or four different parties, just looking like he was having the whale of a time at each single one and then glad-handing the room before heading to the bar later on that evening. That's not something you can imagine Keir Starmer doing. Coming up, what are the possible paths to power for Westreating?

23:55Kieran, do you think West Streeting is liked or known by the general public? Very good question. And there is data that can tell us this. I was going to say he's relatively well liked. I will rephrase that. He is less disliked than other politicians. So if you look at Keir Starmer's approval rating at the moment, it is minus 57, astonishingly low approval rating. Wes Streeting is much better at minus 23. That puts him closer to Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, but interestingly, Wes Streeting, I think, is better known. He is probably, polling suggests, the most liked, alongside Andy Burnham, maybe just below Andy Burnham, of all the potential successors to Keir Starmer.