The joke doing the rounds over the past couple of days has been that the choice of Sir Keir Starmer’s successor is between a candidate too frightened to go for it, another who is salivating over it but can’t go for it, a third who was investigated over her tax affairs and a fourth who has already done it and was so bad at it that his successor was Jeremy Corbyn.
If you think we have had stasis under Starmer, just wait until we have a PM at odds with Labour MPs
As an unashamed admirer of Tony Blair, I should be thrilled that there is at least one potential Labour prime minister who has a basic understanding of the real world. Wes Streeting, who resigned yesterday as Health Secretary, is usually described as a Blairite, although in reality that’s now meaningless as anything other than code for ‘not on the left’.
However he is labelled, it’s clear that of the putative successors – Streeting, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband, along with anyone else who might emerge now that the former Health Secretary is going to trigger a proper contest – only Streeting has the necessary ideas, outlook and competence to actually do the job. To put it another way, only Streeting doesn’t think we spend too little on welfare, that the public sector is by definition morally virtuous, and that when borrowing is at a record £132 billion, it’s a problem for the lenders rather than the government – and taxpayers.
