Could Labour’s Wes Streeting be a future prime minister?

Just what Keir Starmer needed. A profile of his newly promoted shadow health secretary in The New Statesman, headlined: “Is Wes Streeting the next Labour leader?” Starmer must have felt as pleased as John Smith did when he opened The Sunday Times the weekend after he was elected Labour leader in 1992 to find the cover of the magazine devoted to a profile of Tony Blair, headed: “The leader Labour missed?”

It is the fate of party leaders to have the press complaining either that their top team is no good, or that certain members of it are better than they are and ought to have the top job sooner rather than later.

Ailbhe Rea, the author of the New Statesman article, quotes a source saying that Starmer claimed that “he doesn’t care what Streeting’s ambitions are: everyone is entitled to want to be party leader if they have the ability, and, in the meantime, he regards him as a completely loyal figure”.

That sounds a little like Blair saying through gritted teeth that Gordon Brown was perfectly entitled to want his job – “it isn’t an ignoble ambition”. And it is better to have the problem of talented colleagues being talked up than the opposite.

But Rea’s article does reflect something more dangerous for Starmer, which is that Streeting has done so well in his new brief that some Labour MPs are beginning to ask whether, if Starmer continues to struggle to make a connection with the voters, they should follow the example of the Conservatives in ruthlessly changing leader.

It was Streeting who last month led the Labour response to the Tory rebellion over plan B coronavirus restrictions, telling Sajid Javid, the health secretary, that he could rely on Labour to support him in the national interest. It was clever politics, but it was also delivered with some style at the despatch box.

It is at the despatch box, and in media interviews, that Streeting shines where his leader is dull. Streeting’s recent interview with Nick Robinson of the BBC was a remarkably fluent performance, in which he said that if the private sector could be used to get down NHS waiting lists, he would do it. It was Blairite in its simplicity of communication as well as in its politics, but as Rea’s profile records, there is more to him than a simple reheating of the day before yesterday’s Labour policies.

The most striking quotation in that article is from an anonymous Labour MP, who said: “How many people, really, can walk into the chamber and think on their feet? We all think we can, but we can’t. Wes can.”

Wes can. There is a slogan to give Starmer pause.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator