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.
But perhaps he can afford to be straightforward at this point. Out in the world, things are at last going the Labour party’s way, a dramatic change of fortune whose primary cause has, it seems, permeated even these young minds. “Does anyone know what party Boris Johnson belongs to?” Streeting asks now, his time nearly up. Lots of hands fly into the air and he picks out a little boy who cannot be older than five. “Is it… the Christmas party?” he says.
Though Streeting knows better than to laugh, I can sense his delight and after we leave, this inadvertent joke, so perfect it might have been scripted, is the first thing we talk about. “It’s a good job you were there,” he says. “No one would believe it otherwise.” The morning is very cold and the way he bounces along, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, makes me think suddenly of an old Ready Brek ad. You could almost warm your hands on his boyish contentment. “Kids always ask the best questions,” says his chief of staff, Matt, shaking his head, and with this, they take their leave of me and head for Streeting’s house, around the corner. Standing with his compadre on the pavement, the grocer is gone. The shadow secretary of state for health and social care now looks like nothing so much as a sixth former who’s managed to bunk off school a bit early.
Streeting and I talk properly a week later, in his office at Westminster, which he shares with Peter Kyle, the shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland. There are two rooms. In one, where the friends sit next to one another at their respective desks, there is a poster of the 1997 election result – “This is what winning looks like,” Tony Blair has scrawled in magic marker next to a map of Britain that’s almost entirely red – and not one, but two, photographs of the late Tessa Jowell. In the other, used for meetings, there is an espresso machine and a coffee table on top of which is John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee and Odd Couples, a book by the Labour peer, arch Europhile and one-time Labour reformer, Giles Radice. Yes, I have entered the centrist zone.
Streeting arrives a little out of breath, but with his tail up; yesterday, Christian Wakeford, the MP for Bury South, defected to Labour from the Tories and everyone is still high on the thrill of it (or not, as we shall see). What’s the atmosphere like? Is it as febrile as it sounds? “I think he [Boris Johnson] will go,” he says. “It’s a case of when, not if. But I don’t know what’s happened to the Conservative party; it’s not the Conservative party I recognise. For one that has a reputation for being ruthless, they’re underestimating how radioactive he is. Every day he remains in office, the contamination spreads.”
Some on the left are appalled by the welcome Wakeford has received from Keir Starmer. But Streeting couldn’t care less. “I’m not at all put out by the things he [Wakeford] has said in the past. His defection tells us that the Conservative party has changed for the worse, and the Labour party has changed for the better, and I hope this will bring people who voted Conservative to look again at the party under Keir. To the purists, I say: get with the programme. We’re winning the argument.” By his telling, the left is firmly in the descendent now: “There are a bunch of people who were relatively recent joiners to the Labour party who didn’t understand its history or traditions or how you win elections. A lot of people have left who were never really committed to it and frankly, a lot them were barnacles on the boat. The people who denied there was a problem with antisemitism. The people who didn’t understand why voters were affronted by the Labour party. We’re better off without them, bluntly. There has always been a problem with elements of the left, particularly the far left, who revel in their self-righteousness, who love telling voters how disappointed they are in them.”
The party needs Tory voters if it’s ever to win an election and he accepts this. Unlike some, he doesn’t think Tories are bad people. His own politics come from his mother, who is on the left, but his beloved paternal grandfather, a former merchant seaman and one of the biggest influences on his life (Streeting’s Christian faith can be traced to him) was a Tory, as is his father. “My dad is like my one-man focus group: a Sun-reading Essex Tory. I’m interested to know what he thinks about Labour now. He sells cars for a living, so he talks to the general public a lot and he picks up the mood.”
Streeting is a rising star and increasingly tipped as a future Labour leader. But his current ubiquity belies how difficult his first years in parliament were. Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader only months after Streeting became the MP for Ilford North in 2015. “At first, I took solace in the things he said about kinder, gentler politics, about party democracy. I thought, we’ve got a leader who’s well to the left of me, but it will be OK because he’s talking about pluralism; we’ll get through this. What I didn’t anticipate was how bad things would get. We got all the downsides without any of the positives he promised. I found it soul-destroying.
“I was horrified by the antisemitism. My constituency has a significant Jewish population and in 2019, I had lifelong Labour voters literally crying on the doorstep. I couldn’t have looked at myself in the mirror without knowing I did everything I could to tackle it. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. We weren’t able to deal with it because we had a leader who was unable to deal with it. The sad thing is that since Jeremy Corbyn has ceased to be the leader of the Labour party, we’ve seen his true colours in terms of how he conducts himself, what he says, who he associates with. People ask: why isn’t he in the Labour party? [Starmer has refused to reinstate the Labour whip to Corbyn.] The answer is simple: because he chooses not to be. All he has to do is apologise and he can’t even do that.” (Corbyn maintains that the scale of antisemitism in the party was exaggerated for political reasons.)
But things are, he says, different now. How he loves his job! After he was diagnosed with kidney cancer last April, he had every opportunity to reassess his life; that could have been the moment to throw in politics. In fact, the opposite happened. “I keep saying to my partner, Joe [Dancey, a political consultant]: I’m living my best life.” His experiences have turned him into the patient’s champion, one who simply will not allow the government to use the pandemic as an excuse for the now terrifyingly long NHS waiting lists, of which he also has first-hand experience, given that his post-operative scan is running two months late. “It’s supposed to happen after six months; I’m assuming it will happen after nine or 10. Joe has given me quite a hard time this week. You’ve got to get on the phone, he says; if you weren’t shadow health secretary, you would. He’s got a point.”
Streeting’s analysis of the NHS is that it is great in a crisis, but unacceptably poor pre-diagnosis and post-treatment. “On my last day in hospital, all the nurses were consumed with a patient who was having a very severe mental health episode. There was just no one else available for the rest of us.” Advice as to how things would be at home was thin on the ground. “I was frightened when I was diagnosed. Because of the pandemic, I went into the hospital alone. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as lonely at any point in my life as I did then. But one of the few times I really cried over all this was when I went home. I couldn’t get into bed. It was too painful. Poor Joe was Googling YouTube tutorials. In the end, we were saved by an Australian physio who’d made a film for women who’d had caesarean sections.” What’s the solution, though? He talks of reform, big and (relatively) small; if social care has to be completely overhauled so, too, does access. Why isn’t more online booking available to GP patients? Why can’t we use tech to refer ourselves to specialists in other clinical settings? “It’s crazy and inexcusable that we can’t,” he says.
Streeting, who is 39, grew up in a council flat in Stepney, east London. His parents were teenagers when he was born and their relationship didn’t last, though when people describe him as the child of a “single mother”, it doesn’t give the full picture: his father was always around and, as a teenager, Streeting went to live with him. His early life wasn’t easy. His mother was often broke; when she couldn’t afford to top up the electricity meter, the flat would be in darkness. He received free school meals. “I still shudder at the insecurity we felt then,” he says. “Prosperity felt so distant. But I am sensitive when I talk about this. I don’t want to say something that leads to my mum feeling embarrassed and I will always challenge notions of what it means to be poor. I have a different perspective on public services to most middle-class professionals on the left. My memory is of my mum being treated like dirt on the bottom of a shoe by people in the DSS office. That has always stayed with me.”
He dislikes what he calls “the patronising middle-class claptrap on the left about being the saviours of the poor”. What people want, he says, is a sense of control and agency and the tools to make a better life – a form of “scaffolding” that, ultimately, he found he had. “Growing up with my mum, often I’d be the only person at home. She would spend a lot of time talking to me. She treated me almost like an adult; she used to get mildly rebuked by my dad and my grandad for that. But she gave me a degree of responsibility beyond my years; my own sense of agency and even my self-confidence, I get from her.” On his mother’s side, his grandfather was a criminal who had convictions for armed robbery; his grandmother, caught up in these activities, was in prison while she was expecting Streeting’s mother (she shared a cell with Christine Keeler). But he was always encouraged “to read, to work hard and do well” by his parents and his grandfathers, as well as by his teachers. Education was, for him, everything.
Family life was complicated. “I’ve got five brothers, a sister and a stepsister, and I always joke with them that I spent 10 years as an only child and they were the happiest years of my life.” Why did he go to live with his dad? “Lots of reasons. I felt… my mum was going through a lot of upheaval in her life and her relationships and home life was quite disruptive. I went to live with him for what was meant to be a short-term period, but I felt a lot more settled and secure there and in the end I chose to stay, which is probably the hardest conversation I ever had with my mum. It must have been hard for her, but she was good about it.” He is, I think, someone who has a strong sense of what he needs in life.
A teacher in Tower Hamlets suggested he apply to Westminster City school and from there, he won a place at Cambridge. But he knew he was bright early on. “My reading age was always high. I loved school. School for me was often an escape from conditions at home. I didn’t like the long school holidays because home wasn’t always a great place to be.” (Though he was bullied at school for his cleverness.) He remembers the letter from Cambridge landing on the doormat. He’d been waiting for the post every day. “It was like Willy Wonka and the golden ticket,” he says. “I was jumping for joy. I was crying tears of joy.” He will never, he says, apologise for the fact he went to Cambridge. Someone once suggested that he leave off the details of his university education on a leaflet. “Get lost! Why the bloody hell should I be ashamed of that? I’m one of 1% of kids on free school meals who made it. Most parents in my constituency, whether white working class or from the Bangladeshi community, are ambitious for their kids. What they see in me, they want for their own children.”
Was Cambridge a culture shock? “No, I loved it,” he says. He laughs at what he calls his “precociousness”. What he could not pay for with a student loan, he funded with long hours in customer service for Comet during the holidays (he knows a lot about appliance hotlines). He has never really suffered from social anxiety, though his accent has, he admits, changed over the years. “If you’d spoken to me in primary school, I was like something out of the cast of Oliver!. But my grandad always tried to teach me to speak properly, and so did Mr Latimer, one of my teachers, who warned us we might be judged on the way we spoke in the future. Even now, I’ve got a Radio 4 Today programme voice and a TalkRadio voice.”
It was at Cambridge, too, that he came out, having long struggled to reconcile his sexuality with his faith. “I’d thrown my dad off the scent by having girlfriends,” he says. “So he was pretty shocked and fearful in the way that parents are. Would my life be difficult? Would I be discriminated against? It took me years to accept I was gay, so it wasn’t unreasonable to give my dad a few days to come to terms with it. I know we all want the Disney coming out where everyone breaks into chorus, but life isn’t like that. We need to cut people a bit of slack.”
After university, Streeting was elected president of the National Union of Students. He followed this with stints at the thinktank Progress and at Stonewall, the LGBT rights charity, where he was head of education. Does he think that Stonewall, widely criticised for its lobbying tactics and zealous interest in trans rights, has lost its way? For the first time, his caution is palpable. He talks, as he did in a recent BBC interview with Nick Robinson, of compromise; it’s the job of politicians, he says, to provide a table for people on both sides to get around, a place where they could discuss, say, the question of what happens to trans prisoners. Difficult questions should not be “taboo”.
Does he believe in biological sex? “Yes, of course,” he says. Does he think it’s helpful for his colleague David Lammy to accuse women with concerns in this area of being “dinosaurs” who were “hoarding” their rights? For a moment, he is silent. Then he says: “One of the things that men have always underestimated is the sense in which women have felt like they’re being told to be quiet, which is why in this context it is incendiary.” Since he spoke to Robinson, he says, he has been pleased to find that some of his female parliamentary colleagues have felt able to come and talk to him about their concerns.
It’s interesting to contrast this part of our conversation with his openness about his faith. Twenty years ago, I tell him, a journalist would have been more interested in his sexuality than his religion, but now it’s the other way around. He thinks this is probably right. “One of the things that upsets me a bit is that often, what flashes through the minds of people who are not religious when one of our politicians says they are is anxiety. They think: does that mean they are going to oppose a woman’s right to choose or same-sex marriage? But I take a pretty secular outlook on rights under the law.” Does he go to church? “My grandfather brought me to understand that you don’t have to go to church to have a relationship with God. The last time I went was midnight mass on Christmas Eve, but I do go throughout the year and we have a chapel at the Palace of Westminster and there have been times when I’ve gone there to pray about things I’m worried about.” Is his faith a comfort? “Yes, it is.”
Before I go, we talk about his hinterland, that strange territory so few politicians seem to have. His seems quite expansive. He likes opera, though Joe organises their tickets – “I love Tosca and the one with the riddles [I think he means Turandot]” – and then there are box sets: he is a fan of Vera, the crime drama starring Brenda Blethyn. “That’s a bit embarrassing. Maybe don’t write that down.” He took Joe to see Deacon Blue in Southend for his birthday. “I had a UK garage phase in the sixth form, but at heart I’m an indie boy. Britpop was the greatest for me, growing up.”
You’re such a goody two-shoes, I say, because, let’s be honest, he comes out of everything a bit too well. But, no. “I’m really not the Mary Poppins of the Labour party. I’ve got some horror stories.” Like what? I ask, picturing Theresa May running through a field of wheat. With some gusto, he embarks on a long, funny and very elaborate account of teenage drunkenness, a day of shame that saw him vomiting on several passengers on the tube and which climaxed with his father having to hose him down on the front doorstep. “It did my street cred a lot of good at the time,” he says, his eyes sparkling just a little at the memory of that very first and highly influential focus group.
