It is assembly time at Clore Tikva primary school in Barkingside, Ilford and this morning the children have a special guest: the local MP, Wes Streeting. What, I wonder, do they make of this neat, energetic man in a crisp shirt and shiny shoes? Do they know who he is and why he’s here? Possibly not. But even if they don’t, amazingly, he has their attention. Unlike many MPs, who struggle to talk naturally to adults, let alone to children, Streeting knows just how to handle his crowd today, dressing his speech up as a kind of quiz, opening each question – What do MPs do? Where do they work? – to the floor before answering it himself. Somehow, he makes it all sound so exciting: the leaflets, the surgeries, even his long commute to the Palace of Westminster. “Sometimes I drive and sometimes I get the tube,” he tells them, as if this was the most thrilling journey in all the world.
From a tiny chair at the side of the hall, I carefully consider Streeting, a man who at moments might belong to another age entirely. It’s not only that his crab apple cheeks and short back and sides give him the look of a kindly wartime grocer, the sort who might slip you a bag of illicit sugar. Some of what he says is also, to my ears, strikingly retro. Twice, he tells the children that he’s a Christian, the kind of admission made only rarely in politics these days (when Tony Blair was asked about his faith, Alastair Campbell is supposed to have said: “We don’t do God.”), while of his education, he explains: “I went to Cambridge, which is one of our best universities.” (What? Doesn’t the Labour party frown on such elitism?) When the children, who have spent so much of their short lives under the pandemic, tell him what they would do if they were prime minister – “people should be allowed to play in the garden, but only sometimes”, “everyone should wear their masks” – I have the feeling that he rather approves, for all that he joshes them for their strictness.
