Wes Streeting: we need the private sector to help reform the NHS

When Labour MPs gossip about who could be their next leader, Wes Streeting’s name invariably comes up. Like Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, Labour’s shadow health secretary spends half his time insisting he’s not running for the top job. Also like Rayner, he’s never actually stood for it – yet. But there have been plenty of moments in the past year when some of his comrades have wished he was the leader of the opposition rather than Keir Starmer.

Streeting became suspiciously more visible as the ‘Beergate’ investigation into whether Starmer and Rayner breached Covid restrictions reached its climax earlier this year. When I mentioned his frequent media appearances to another Labour front bencher, he shrugged: ‘When has Wes not been running?’

It’s true that Streeting, who was elected as the MP for Ilford North in 2015, often seems to be running for something. He was president of the National Union of Students for two terms between 2008 and 2010. The NUS is even harder work than the Labour party when it comes to factional infighting, particularly if, like Streeting, you’re a centrist. He worked as head of education for Stonewall and was a councillor in Redbridge before he entered parliament. At Cambridge, he was also active in student politics.

His early life, however, isn’t so typical of a Blairite politician. ‘I’m still one of a small minority of [MPs] who grew up experiencing poverty,’ he explains, as he tells me about his upbringing in Tower Hamlets. ‘I was born to teenage parents, my mum was 18 when I was born, my dad was 17. I was an accident and that relationship didn’t last more than a year after I was born. My dad was a very present father in my life but my mum was bringing me up as a single mum during the week, and I spent weekends with my dad.