Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary and is poised to mount a Labour leadership challenge against Sir Keir Starmer, telling the PM: “Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” The Telegraph has more.
Streeting listed a series of “mistakes” that had contributed to the historic local election losses last week, including cutting the winter fuel allowance of Sir Keir’s “island of strangers” speech.
Wes Streeting has told Sir Keir Starmer that he has “lost confidence” in him and that it would be “dishonourable” to continue serving in his Cabinet.
The former health secretary said: “There is no doubt that the unpopularity of this Government was a major and common factor in our defeats across England, Scotland and Wales. Good Labour people lost through no fault of their own.
“There are many reasons we could point to: from individual mistakes on policy like the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance to the ‘island of strangers’ speech, all of which have left the country not knowing who we are or what we really stand for. “
He added: “The National Health Service is the embodiment of all that is best about Britain and our values. Thanks to our Labour Government, it is on the road to recovery: lots done, but so much more to do.
“These are all good reasons for me to remain in post, but as you know from our conversation earlier this week, having lost confidence in your leadership, I have concluded that it would be dishonourable and unprincipled to do so.”
Streeting accused Starmer of not taking enough responsibility for his mistakes, with “other people falling on their swords” instead.
He said: “But where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift. This was underscored by your speech on Monday.
“Leaders take responsibility, but too often that has meant other people falling on their swords. You also need to listen to your colleagues, including backbenchers, and the heavy-handed approach to dissenting voices diminishes our politics.”
Tony Diver notes an “interesting line in Wes Streeting’s resignation letter that could significantly change how the leadership crisis in Downing Street plays out”.
The former health secretary said he wanted a “debate” in the Labour Party and a “battle of ideas”, which is a coded reference to a leadership contest.
But he also said he wanted the process to have the “best possible field of candidates”. That would appear to suggest he wants Andy Burnham, the Manchester Mayor, to be allowed to run.
Burnham is not currently an MP, but his allies want any leadership contest to be delayed until after he runs in a by-election. He is the most popular contender with the public, polls show.
Streeting tweeted his resignation letter:
Follow the Telegraph‘s live coverage here.
Stop Press: Andy Burnham is set to return to Parliament to stand in the anticipated Labour leadership election after Josh Simons, the MP for Makerfield in Greater Manchester, resigned to make way for him. Simons resigned from his ministerial role in February over his involvement in a smear campaign against journalists when he ran the Morgan McSweeney-founded think-tank Labour Together. Reform has said it will fight hard in the by-election to defeat Burnham, with the latest MRP polling from Electoral Calculus (conducted last month) showing the seat would likely fall to Reform in an imminent general election by 46 to 35% – though a Burnham by-election could change that.
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Wes Streeting: Anatomy of a resignation letter
It’s all over the media right now, but what does the Health Secretary’s self-serving statement really mean? Time to get out the scalpel…
“What we’ve seen today is a bold and principled decision…” Those were the words of Alan Gemmell, the Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, on BBC Radio 4’s World At One this lunchtime. He was talking about Wes Streeting’s choice to resign as Health Secretary, but not, as of the moment that I’m typing this sentence, to formally challenge Keir Starmer as Labour leader and Prime Minister.
Gemmell, who backs Streeting for the job, managed to say “bold” and “principled” seriously. No one with any commitment to the meaning of words thinks Wes Streeting is bold or principled. He’s been jockeying for the top job since the moment he got into parliament, and there have been several false starts in his quest for the leadership in the last few months alone.
On BBC News, Chris Mason, giddy like a Newsround press packer, called Streeting’s resignation letter a “devastating critique of the Prime Minister’s policies”. So I thought I’d take a closer look at that letter and break it down as an example of one of politics’ most self-serving art forms.
Streeting begins by congratulating himself on his achievements in the job he’s just left:
Dear Prime Minister,
The results are in, and I am pleased to report that I have delivered against the ambitious targets you set for me when I became your Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Today’s figures confirm that we surpassed our waiting times target despite strikes, and that waiting lists fell by 110,000 in March – the biggest monthly drop outside of Covid since 2008 meaning that we are on track to achieve the fastest improvement in NHS waiting times in history.
The way that’s phrased comes over less like a report from a government minister and more like a presenter eager to enlarge their own role reading out the numbers from the public vote on a shiny-floor TV talent show. That’s fairly appropriate.
A key point in Streeting’s excitement is that the targets which have been exceeded are targets that the government set for itself. It’s a rigged game, and he’s measuring improvements from an all-time low during the Covid pandemic.
He continues:
The only question that matters in government is whether we leave our successors a better situation than we inherited. Ambulance response times for heart attacks and strokes are now the fastest in five years. A&E waiting times are improving, with four-hour waiting figures also the best in five years. We’ve recruited 2,000 more GPs and satisfaction has risen from 60 per cent to 74.5 per cent since we came to office. We hit our target of recruiting 8,500 mental health staff three years early. We’ve achieved this at the same as balancing the books for the first time in nine years and smashing the 2 per cent NHS productivity target by achieving 2.8 per cent, which means the investment we’re putting in goes further and that the public can have greater confidence that their money is being well-spent.
The word “we” appears a lot in that paragraph and the one that follows it, but we know that it’s really pronounced “I” in this case. The point of going through the figures in such detail is to allow Streeting to compare his ‘success’ with what he lays out as the wider government’s failures later in the letter.
Once he’s completed the ministerial equivalent of an Oscars speech — thanking the permanent secretary at the Department of Health and the Chief Executive of NHS England rather than his agent and god — Streeting moves swiftly onto the kicking he’s been waiting to give Starmer:
These are all good reasons for me to remain in post, but as you know from our conversation earlier this week, having lost confidence in your leadership, I have concluded that it would be dishonourable and unprincipled to do so.
We’re back in the territory of unmooring words from their definitions, this time with “honourable” joining “principled” in the group of adjectives turned inside out.
It’s at this point that Streeting flails in the direction of statesmanship, trying to offer an analysis of what went wrong in last week’s elections:
… [the] results were unprecedented – both in terms of the scale of the defeat and the consequences of that failure. For the first time in our country’s history, nationalists are in power in every corner of the United Kingdom – including a dangerous English nationalism represented by Nigel Farage and Reform UK. This represents both an existential threat to the future integrity of the United Kingdom, but Reform UK also represent a threat to the values and ideals that have made this country great. Progressives across our country understand this threat and our responsibility to confront it, but they are increasingly losing faith that the Labour Party is capable of rising to our historic responsibility of defeating racism and offering hope that Britain’s best days lie ahead through social democracy.
The threat from Reform is undeniable, but it’s hard to take lectures on the “values and ideals that have made this country great” from a man who was very close friends with Peter Mandelson. Confronted with Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, it’s hard not to get the “they’re the same picture” meme forming in your mind. Their 17-minute meeting in Downing Street yesterday could have been a live-action recreation of another meme: Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, only with figures who would be far more disturbing clad all in spandex. The idea that Wes Streeting as Prime Minister wouldn’t attempt to appease Reform voters with Diet Farage policies just as Starmer has done is unbelievable. He would be exactly as craven.
Streeting’s letter continues:
There is no doubt that the unpopularity of this Government was a major and common factor in our defeats across England, Scotland and Wales. Good Labour people lost through no fault of their own. There are many reasons we could point to: from individual mistakes on policy like the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance to the ‘island of strangers’ speech, all of which have left the country not knowing who we are or what we really stand for.
Under Cabinet collective responsibility, Streeting backed those decisions and went out on the media round to do so time and time again. He distances himself from them now because he sees a moment of political opportunity. He objects not from a point of principle but of strategic advantage. If the ‘island of strangers’ line on immigration had worked, he would have been all for it.
Next, we move on to the section with the performative expressions of respect:
You have many great strengths that I admire. You led our party to a victory few thought possible in 2024 and I was proud to fight alongside you in the trenches of that campaign. You have shown courage and statesmanship on the world stage – not least in keeping Britain out of the war in Iran.
There’s a reason that politicians love war metaphors so much. It makes them feel a lot more exciting; Starmer and Streeting were in the trenches rather than in a series of identical-looking green rooms with reliably terrible selections of sandwiches and a miasma of farts hanging in the air. If Streeting really believed Starmer is courageous and statesmanlike, he’d not be in the process of pummelling him in prose.
And here comes that pummeling:
But where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift. This was underscored by your speech on Monday. Leaders take responsibility, but too often that has meant other people falling on their swords. You also need to listen to your colleagues, including backbenchers, and the heavy-handed approach to dissenting voices diminishes our politics.
There’s a Thatcher-like tone to the first line of that paragraph, conjuring a kind of inverted spectre of her quoting St Francis’ prayer as she entered Downing Street in 1979 (“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth…”). Here’s Streeting bringing discord, but without taking the final step to actually challenge the Prime Minister. Instead, he’s hoping to ratchet up the pressure and force Starmer to stand down. It’s Brutus picking peer pressure over a dagger.
If Streeting wants to project an image of himself as a leader capable of inspiring rhetoric, it’s not present in this letter. It’s the same old pablum pumped out by the Labour right technocrats. What is this couplet but the political equivalent of a line printed in a greeting card? “As a member of your government, I know better than most that governing is hard. It should be, because it matters.” From that facile sentiment comes a kind of ex-ministerial rewrite of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire:
We have wars raging in Europe and the Middle East that are making our challenges harder, not easier. We are in the foothills of a technological industrial revolution that has huge implications for every aspect of our lives – not least the future of work.
It is not clear whether democracy or tyranny will define the 21st century. After the financial crisis, austerity, the disaster of Brexit, Liz Truss, the covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now the war in Iran, the country needs to believe again that things can be better than this and that politics is part of the answer, not the source of the problem.
Then come more lines that sound like big statements but mean basically nothing. There are “big challenges”, and they require “a bold vision and bigger solutions”. Does Wes Streeting have those? No, not really. But he can talk about those “big challenges” with a big, serious look on his face that in no way resembles a toddler straining on a potty. Who, besides Wes Streeting, is really convinced that he is the man to persuade the world that “politics is part of the answer, not the source of the problem”? This is a man who looks like he was created in a pod as part of some kind of mad Blairite science project.
The next part of the letter is the one that has got political correspondents busting out their decoder rings and dusty old Enigma machines:
It is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election and that Labour MPs and Labour Unions want the debate about what comes next to be a battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism. It needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates. I support that approach and I hope that you will facilitate this.
When he says that the leadership contest “needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates”, and that Starmer should “facilitate” that, it means he can argue that he’s not afraid of facing Andy Burnham while knowing that the chances of the Manchester Mayor actually making it into parliament and into a leadership contest are slimmer than the average MP mainlining Mounjaro.
Finally, the letter comes to its crocodile-tear-soaked conclusion:
Serving as your Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has been the greatest joy of my life and, regardless of our differences this week, I remain truly grateful to you for the opportunity to serve and I am deeply saddened to be leaving government in this way.
Never has someone so saddened and grateful been so unable to stifle a Cheshire Cat grin. With any luck, this resignation letter will become an artefact in an exhibit about history’s most hilariously inept coups. So far, Streeting is making David Miliband look like Che Guevara.
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This article (Wes Streeting: Anatomy of a resignation letter) was created and published by Mic Wright and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: The Telegraph
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