Wes streeting

Wednesday morning at Labour conference is back to being the graveyard shift, with the delegates who are still there nursing hangovers and sharing videos of the speakers on the stage doing karaoke the night before. But this morning’s session covered two of the most important public services from two of the party’s rising stars – Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson. Streeting was in the gravest of the graveyard slots this morning Streeting is everywhere (including in the karaoke videos), and some of his colleagues are a bit irritated that he seems to have been anointed as the next Labour leader. Phillipson, though, is the one to watch because she unnerves

All bets were off at the Hippodrome casino last night as London’s nerdiest politicos piled into Leicester Square to watch the first For the Many live recording. For those unfamiliar with this Westminster institution, it is nothing but an hour of smut and innuendo masquerading as a political podcast. Carry On Up The Commons, if you will. And hosts Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith were on fine form as they welcomed a rising star into their midst: Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting. The stage, we were informed, was where the muscled lotharios of the popular Magic Mike strip show usually gyrate, titillate and stimulate heaving hordes of female admirers. And it was Streeting’s turn to excite and

Wes Streeting has enjoyed something of a dream start since his promotion to shadow health secretary a month ago. Confident at the despatch box and assured on a media round, his performance in the ‘Plan B’ debate had centrist dads of a certain vintage humming ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ once more. But while Labour’s poll lead has shot up in recent weeks, the spectre of Covid has emerged once more to remind Sir Keir’s Starm troopers of the unpredictable perils of pandemic politics. The emergence of Omicron just before Christmas posed a challenge to politicians of all stripes: should we reintroduce restrictions to stop the health service being overwhelmed? Boris Johnson, for

Sajid Javid found himself wading through treacle as he tried to make the case for the government’s ‘Plan B’ to MPs this afternoon. The impediments to his progress were constant interventions from all sides, including his own, questioning the wisdom of these measures, the data behind them and the principles at stake. The Health Secretary tried to be as mollifying as possible, taking the majority of these interventions, even when they were from an MP who had interrupted him before. His respectful manner did mean that colleagues weren’t visibly angry with Javid, but given their ire is largely directed at Boris Johnson, this tells us very little about the size