It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says.
The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: ‘Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.’ Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, accused Streeting of ‘overshadowing’ the government’s policy platform and ‘playing Westminster games’.
The day before, MPs and ministers supporting the Health Secretary had broken cover to call for Starmer to stand down, but the man himself seemed uncertain whether to take the plunge. Insiders say Streeting’s allies were divided for much of Tuesday. One characterised the division as ‘old Wes people’ who questioned whether he actually had a plan to win the contest, while ‘the factional headbangers’ from the ultra-Blairite thinktank Progress urged him to ‘seize the moment’.
