The imperious arrogance of Wes Streeting

Has there ever existed a man whose arrogance is so out of proportion to his talents? I am of course talking about Wes Streeting – Britain’s secretary of state for health, cracker of the most terrible committee-written jokes, and the man hilariously gushed over by witless centrists as the saviour of Labour. No shade, but if the answer is ‘Wes Streeting’, you are asking the wrong question. Unless the question is ‘Who’s the biggest tit on the frontbench?’.

Streeting is back in the news, like that C-list celeb who just won’t leave us alone, after self-leaking the WhatsApp chats he had with ultimate wrong’un, Peter Mandelson. Peeved that some in the media have been calling him a mate of Mandy, Streeting wanted to set the record straight. He was merely an acquaintance of Mandelson’s who would occasionally ask that Prince of Darkness for advice on the burning issues of the day and then put kisses all over his messages, okay? Not buddies at all.

Now that Mandelson’s love-in with crooked girl-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has properly blown up, Streeting is doing some serious distancing. He says he dumped his Mandy texts on the web because he’s sick of all the ‘smear and innuendo’ suggesting he has ‘something to hide’. He should have kept them private. Because it turns out he does have something to hide – that he’s a properly haughty politician who’ll happily throw everyone and everything under the bus to save his own lacklustre career.

The thing that really leapt out at me was Streeting’s bitching about Israel. It oozes with imperious conceit. In July 2025, he pressed Mandelson for his thoughts on recognising a Palestinian state. ‘Morally and politically, I think we need to join France’, said Streeting, referencing President Macron’s decision to recognise Palestine. There they are, Wes and Mandy, like a couple of Poundshop Sir Mark Sykes, musing on how to carve up the Holy Land. Someone please tell these donuts the British Empire is kaput. White men in Whitehall no longer get to magic up states in the Middle East.

What Streeting said next is genuinely troubling. Israel is behaving like a ‘rogue state’, he said. Let’s punish it, he suggested. We should ‘let them pay the price as pariahs’. He said we should impose sanctions on the entire dastardly nation, ‘not just a few ministers’. Who the hell does he think he is? Mate, you run the NHS – badly – not the Middle East. The breezy manner with which he proposed that Israel be damned with pariah status speaks to the staggering hubris of these two texting technocrats.

It confirms what the recognition of Palestine was really about – not improving the lot of Palestinians but shaming and isolating Israel. It was nation-building as a weapon, driven by a colonialist instinct to reprimand the uppity Jewish State. It was a back-covering exercise, too. ‘There are no circumstances’, Streeting texted, ‘in which people like me or Shabana [Mahmood] could abstain or vote against [Palestine recognition]’. Britain and France’s recognition of Palestine emboldened Hamas. Hamas gushed that it was one of the ‘fruits’ of their fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. And for what? To let a couple of crisis-ridden hacks in the Labour Party save face in the Commons and their own constituencies? Now that’s pariah behaviour, Wes.

Other messages confirm why Streeting was so adamant about a Palestinian state – because he lives in fear of losing his seat to the Muslim vote. He said in one message that he thinks he’ll be ‘toast’ at the next election (don’t threaten us with a good time). That’s partly because Labour has ‘no growth strategy’ and no answer to voters’ question of ‘Why Labour?’, he said. And it’s partly because the sectarian vote is viciously nipping at Labour’s heels.

‘I fear we’re in big trouble’, he said in one message. ‘We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51 per cent Muslim, Ilford [South]) to a Gaza independent’, he wrote. And ‘at this rate I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats’. One of those seats, of course, is Streeting’s: he’s MP for Ilford North. This is why he thinks he might be ‘toast’, and this is why he was insistent he could never oppose a Palestinian state – because ‘the Gaza vote’ is coming for him.

The levels of pork-barrel calculation on display here are staggering. ‘Save Gaza’, the left yelps, yet Streeting is more interested in saving his own arse. Screw the State of Israel, I need to protect my little fiefdom of Ilford. Is this cultural appeasement of sectarian voters? It smacks of it to me. That Streeting thought these messages would paint him in a positive light post-Mandelson is mindblowing, for what they really confirm is the willingness of the nominal secularists of Britain’s social-democratic party to play the sectarian game if it will help them keep their grubby mitts in the till of power.

Oh, Wes – you thought you were moving on from the Mandy years but all you’ve done is confirm that Labour is entirely unfit for power. It’s a lost party, bereft of principle, cruel to its allies and craven in the face of sectarianism. Listless, exhausted and boring. I already knew I wanted Labour out – now I really know.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.