Wes Streeting bounds onto the stage for a conversation with Matthew Stadlen (deputising for Iain Dale) at the Edinburgh festival. Labour’s new health secretary wears grey slacks, white trainers and an open-necked shirt. He hasn’t found time to put on a jacket or tie. ‘I came literally from the airport in my holiday get-up,’ he says.
Stadlen opens with a softball question about Streeting’s emotional response to Labour’s victory. ‘Walking up Downing Street, it was all I could do not to burst into tears,’ says Streeting. The cosy atmosphere continues throughout their chat. ‘In your letter to GPs,’ says Stadlen, ‘there was real respect in your tone.’
‘Do you dance?’ asks Stadlen, ‘Do you go clubbing?’
Streeting agrees and he lavishes himself with praise for making a swift accommodation with the striking doctors. He feels it’s ‘humbling’ to be part of a new Labour government, although he confesses that he never expected Sir Keir Starmer to reach No. 10. ‘When he became leader I thought – that poor sod is going to be the next Neil Kinnock.’
Streeting won his Ilford North seat by a margin of just 528 votes and his campaign was harmed by a fake recording of him using ‘foul language’ to describe dead Palestinian children. To limit the damage he immediately declared the tape a hoax and his rebuttal was believed by everybody except the Tory peer, Sayeeda Warsi, who assumed the recording was genuine. ‘Are you OK?’ she messaged him, ‘we all say angry things in the heat of the moment.’
He has high hopes for the Labour cabinet which is ‘one of the most working-class ever.’ He includes Angela Rayner and Bridget Phillipson (but not Sir Keir) among those who were born into disadvantage. Of his own background, he says that he ‘grew up in poverty’ in East London. His father, a committed Tory supporter, voted Labour on 4 July for the first time in his life.
Streeting drops a couple of bombshells about our ‘broken’ NHS. He says the Care Quality Commission, (the NHS’s internal inspectorate), is unreliable and that its reports are incomplete or based on unfounded evidence. ‘They should be taken with a pinch of salt,’ he says. And he’s in despair about the state of the nation’s teeth. An elderly woman sent him a photo of her rotting fangs and asked if he could fix them. He hadn’t the heart to tell her that NHS dentistry ‘had an underspend of £400m last year.’ He doesn’t explain how he intends to correct this colossal blunder.
He’s adept itemising the NHS’s problems but he seems clueless about solving them. On social care, he rattles off a list of Conservative prime ministers who failed to tackle the issue: Sunak, Johnson, May and Cameron. And yet his answer to the crisis is vague. ‘A cross-party approach,’ he shrugs.
During his years in opposition he was able to study health care systems around the world, and he concluded that the NHS is extremely wasteful. ‘We’re near the top of the table for spending but we have to ask harder questions about where the money goes.’
‘So,’ asks Stadlen, ‘are there any healthcare models abroad that you intend to copy?’
‘No,’ says Streeting. Clearly his masterplan is to leave the problems to fester rather than eliminating them. Whitehall will love him.
Stadlen ends the interview by asking Streeting to assess his own character. ‘What are you like as a person?’
‘I’m a joy,’ says Streeting. ‘Perfect in every way. I’m Mary Poppins.’
‘But how do your friends describe you?’
‘Driven. A workaholic,’ he says. ‘But I haven’t lost my sense of fun. And I’m more self-critical than people think.’ The experience of writing his memoirs, he says, taught him a valuable lesson. ‘Ageing is humbling,’ he reveals.
‘Do you dance?’ asks Stadlen, ‘Do you go clubbing?’
‘I did at the weekend in Paris,’ says Streeting. ‘I quite enjoyed the anonymity.’
Streeting emphasises that many of our health problems arise from our personal choices. Addiction, poor diet and a lack of exercise contribute to illness. In other words, it’s all our fault that we’re ill. Which is a reasonable conclusion. But if he wants us to look after our own health, why does he expect us to pay for a failing NHS as well?
Comments