Go for the kill Wes
Don’t muck about any more
In so many ways the events of the last week are a bald repeat of the events of 2023 and the resignation of Boris Johnson. A Prime Minister has been staggering for months over an external scandal which he cannot brush off because of his other failings; an international foreign policy crisis has briefly propped up his premiership, now the chickens have come home to roost. The media have made their mind up, as have the Palace, who are now anti-democratically attacking the elected Prime Minister by briefing the press against Starmer. We’ve seen it all before, mate, there’s nothing new under the sun. Today’s news, tomorrow’s fish paper.
The most interesting parallel, to my mind, is between Rishi Sunak and Wes Streeting. Here we have a millennial waiting in the wings who is, if not more intelligent, substantially more diligent than his Britpopper boss. A millennial who has excelled in a technically challenging brief against the general trend of incompetence. Just as Boris never read through his box, Starmer came to power saying he wouldn’t do a full week’s work, keeps trying to go to football matches and delegates all of his decisions to his subordinates. The criticism aimed at Wes is that he is unnervingly ambitious, never that he is lazy.
Here is one way in which Streeting differs from Sunak. Whilst Sunak was a gentleman amateur who floated into politics, Streeting has been in politics since he was a teenager and has been inexorably grinding towards the position of Prime Minister ever since, it is all that he has planned for, all that he has thought about for the better part of his forty three years on Earth.
The all-encompassing importance of becoming Prime Minister to Streeting is why I believe he made the error today of not coming out over the top and challenging Starmer directly, instead giving a hostile No. 10 operation a full day to recoup. With the benefit of hindsight it’s obvious that Streeting should have resigned this morning when Starmer was at his moment of maximum peril instead of being fobbed off for a meeting tomorrow.
Unlike Sunak, who was made Chancellor so he could have an excuse to cancel his monthly lunches at the Bristol with Aunt Agatha, Streeting is a obsessive, to the extent that missing out on the opportunity to get the top job might even drive him to self-annihilation. He cannot just resign on a tally-ho and back to the Drones for some lemon tarts and squash.
He knows that the decisions he makes in these precious hours will determine whether or not all of that backstabbing and sliming around with Mandelson was leading somewhere – all of that hacking in the student union – whether or not he will have to consider his life’s work a failure or a success. He knows that if he gets it wrong - that’s it - because his majority in Ilford is so thin that he will not survive the next election.
Streeting will no doubt be concerned, because of the Tory meme about ‘He who wields the knife shall never wield the crown’, that if he pulls the trigger now he will always be seen as treacherous, something that will hang over him during the next leadership contest. This was indeed a problem for Rishi Sunak. Liz Truss benefited enormously from having the endorsement of Boris Johnson in the 2022 leadership race.
But there are two crucial differences with the 2022 race:
Boris remained popular with a section of both the Parliamentary Party and the membership, whereas nearly everybody recognises that Keir is useless at politics.
Wes is already considered a slimy rat weasel by the people who hate him. This problem with him as a candidate is already priced in.
And then one important similarity:
Wes’s likely opponent, be it Burnham/Miliband/Rayner, is promising a set of policies which will send gilt yields up and force the Bank of England to intervene.
J’accuse is always about the future, and that is why we can see two steps ahead of the usual flim flam. It is entirely plausible that Angela Rayner defeats Wes Streeting in a leadership election which begins a week from now. In fact this increasingly looks like the most likely series of events.
If Rayner becomes Prime Minister she will simply tell the OBR to ‘bog off’ when they tell her that she is not allowed to borrow more money.
If Streeting runs a campaign which mirrors the same one that Sunak did – emphasising fiscal responsibility and calling Rayner a stupid drunken woman – he may find a month later that the PLP is begging for him to become Prime Minister to stop mortgage rates reaching ten percent and precipitating a housing crash.
Waiting any longer will just give the people who hate him more time to come up with ways of preventing his ascension. Right now you have a winning hand. You must play it. Wes. It’s time to Lead.