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There must be a happy medium somewhere. Some ministers you can’t get to shut up, others refuse to say a word. On balance, Keir Starmer probably prefers it when they say next to nothing. On the grounds there is probably less that can go wrong. He likes it best when he is the one doing the talking as he is more in control of the message. The only trouble is, the public often prefer it when it’s someone else doing the talking. Especially when that person is Wes Streeting.
OK, so we all know that Streeting can be a bit annoying. No one is ever going to love Wes in quite the same way Wes loves Wes. The self-regard is total. And he has never made any secret that his ambition goes well beyond being health secretary. He wants the top job and will be among the first to put his name forward when Starmer decides – or has it decided for him – that enough is enough. And of course, Wes is constantly plotting. How do we know? Because he is breathing.
But here’s the thing. Despite all this – or maybe even because of it – Streeting is one of the better performers on the Labour frontbench. He believes in himself and he believes in the NHS and has no qualms about trying to make a good news story out of both. Above all, he looks like he cares. As if he is up for the fight of making the health service better again.
Streeting is a natural salesman. When team Starmer briefed against Wes shortly before Christmas, insisting he was trying to stage a coup to oust him from No 10 – Keir still isn’t quite sure how that inquiry into the leaks Keir started is going – the whole thing backfired. Because on the media round the very next day, Wes did a star turn. Not only deflecting the whole thing as paranoia, but showing everyone why he would make a much better leader than Starmer. Confident, clear and assured. Here was a genuine prime minister in waiting. If people hadn’t seen Wes as a successor to Starmer before this, they did now. This was Wes leading Wes’s charmed life.
Since then, Streeting has kept more of a low profile. A spell on the sidelines doing a conspicuous show of loyalty wouldn’t do his long-term chances any harm. But with Starmer’s popularity ratings still flatlining and the questions over his tenure in Downing Street becoming more persistent, Wes had decided that it was time to break cover again. And it was done with some subtlety. No great LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE klaxon. There again, maybe it’s a sign of Keir’s weakness that even a simple statement of the obvious can be seen as a threat.
Not so long ago, Starmer gave a speech in which he had a moan about the levers of power being frustratingly slow. That civil servants were too comfortable in the tepid bath of the status quo. This was followed up by an article written by one of his former staffers who also moaned about the speed of government. Neither appeared to realise that the public weren’t that interested in the internal workings of the administration. They just wanted something to change. They were fed up with being broke and no public services working properly. Having to listen to the powerful saying how powerless they felt made people want to kick something.
Wes, though, understood the public’s mood perfectly. So in a keynote speech to the Institute for Government’s conference on Tuesday morning, he set about challenging his own government’s orthodoxy. It wasn’t good enough just to complain about the levers of power, he said. The government had been elected to improve public services and that’s what he was determined to do. It was up to him and other ministers to change the system if the system wasn’t working. He didn’t mention Starmer once. He didn’t need to. Everyone understood the subtext. Wes was being Wes. He was ready whenever the call might come. He didn’t mind waiting a little while longer. Time was on his side.
Later in the morning, we were treated to the more monosyllabic – borderline mute – kind of minister that Starmer much prefers. The type of ministerial performance that the public rightly detest. The junior housing minister Matthew Pennycook had been summoned to the Commons to answer an urgent question brought by Tory shadow minister Alicia Kearns on the proposals for the new Chinese embassy near the City of London. The Daily Telegraph had been shown the unredacted plans, which showed there were 208 secret rooms and a hidden bunker with extractor fans little more than a metre or so away from fibre optic cables carrying sensitive financial and personal data. Ideal for hacking.
Now it’s fair to say that if the plans were being considered by a Tory government – a decision is expected in a week’s time – then Pennycook might have had quite a lot to say on the subject. Along the lines of falling over backwards to accommodate a hostile and authoritarian state. But all this was happening on Labour’s watch and so Pennycook had taken a vow of silence.
Now, it maybe be harsh to pick Matthew out as personally responsible. He was just the messenger. The fall guy sent out because neither his boss – the housing, communities and local government secretary, Steve Reed – nor the security minister, Dan Jarvis, felt quite brave enough to front this one up. So the janitor was sent out. And Pennycook died a thousand deaths.
He’s not the most self-aware of men, but even he could sense that things weren’t going well for him. He could hardly not. It wasn’t just the Tories and the Lib Dems who had him in their sights. Every single Labour backbencher was angry that the proposed embassy looked like it was getting the go-ahead just to keep in with the Chinese. Just imagine the Chinese doing the same for us. You can’t.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on this case,” Pennycook said time and time again as MPs raised every objection from data theft to bounties and transnational killings. Matthew was unmoved. “No decision had been made but all considerations are being … er, considered.” It was a graceless performance. I hope he reckons it was worth it.
