Wes Streeting would be a comically awful prime minister

I’ve finally figured out why I find Wes Streeting so grating. It’s because he bigs up his working-class origins even as he shits all over working-class Britain. ‘I’m from Stepney’, he chirps, like a camp Dick van Dyke, before looking down his Cambridge-educated nose at his fellow oiks who voted for Brexit. He wears his humble roots like fancy dress to disguise his lofty indifference to the populist beliefs of those who don’t only come from working-class Britain but still live there. ‘I’m one of you’, he says, when every Brit with a brain knows he’s one of Them.

Everyone is asking the wrong question about Streeting, the former health secretary who seems to have been on manoeuvres against Keir Starmer’s shitshow of a premiership since Day 1. ‘Can he go all the way?’, asks every intrigue-addicted hack in SW1, when what they should be asking is: ‘Who in the name of all that is holy thinks Wes Streeting is the answer to Britain’s problems?’ It terrifies me more than I can say that there exist in the Labour Party people who think this Third Way tit with his committee-written jokes and petrol-blue suits should be PM. No further proof is needed that Labour is over. O-V-E-R.

Don’t get me wrong, Streeting’s floundering campaign for the crown has been hilarious. It was rumoured for months that he wanted to clear out robotic, adenoidal Starmer in favour of his own robotic, adenoidal shtick. And following the trouncing of Labour in the local and devolved elections last week, this bloodless clash between the two beigest men in politics warmed up a little. Streeting is going to launch a leadership challenge, his oddball allies told their old university chums in the bourgeois press. Actually, gloated the Starmerites, he doesn’t ‘have the numbers’. Now, at last, it seems he’ll strike: he resigned as health secretary today.

It is the palest, most pathetic palace coup in the history of these isles. I’ve witnessed pub fights of more consequence. It shames my English heart that we’ve gone from the Battle of Marston Moor to this clash of midwits cut from the same grey cloth of technocracy. If Streeting really has found his spine, thanks to his hypemen hoodwinking a few more MPs into backing him, what earthly difference will it make? He’d be Starmer 2.0 – a husk of a PM whose historic role will be to oversee the richly deserved death of a Labour Party that long ago betrayed the kind of people Wes grew up with.

The idea that ‘the boy from Stepney’ will breathe life into the body politic is undiluted hogwash. It’s an idea that excites Guardianistas in particular. Leftists called Arabella or Edred love to gush over Angela Rayner as a salt-of-the-earth broad they might enjoy half an ale with, and over Streeting as the one Eastender they could chat to without suffering a microaggression. That’s because while Streeting the man might be from the working class, Streeting the politician was forged entirely in the institutions of elite groupthink. He might be a ‘boy from Stepney’ but he is a seasoned creature of the establishment.

Rarely in the history of our politics has someone from humble origins being so successfully flattened into a fleshy embodiment of elite opinion. Consider the conveyor belt he rode into politics. His first big role was as president of National Union of Students, that assembly of the most insufferable youths in the land whose raised fists and daft keffiyehs cannot disguise their zealous middle-class careerism. He then worked for Stonewall for a year-and-a-half – the former gay-rights charity turned trans cult which helped to lay waste to the rights of women by conspiring to destroy sexed language and even single-sex spaces.

Streeting has more recently said it was wrong to chant ‘Trans women are women, get over it!’. He has even graciously decreed that gender-critical women should not be silenced. Ladies, you may speak! Wes says so! Yet it would be folly of the gravest kind to ignore that this aspiring PM was once at the heart of a charity whose neo-religious dogmas led to the shattering of female liberty and the drugging of gay teens. He later did stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a Labour think-tank, no doubt guzzling down more crank woke Kool-Aid as he went.

Streeting the Downing Street dreamer was made not by the working class but by the institutions of the anti-working class. In the rarefied charity sector with its post-truth, anti-woman bollocks, and among student agitators who break out in hives at the sight of a Brexit voter, and in the plush offices of snotty think-tanks that examine the masses rather than talking to them. He is the star protégé of the wankerati. Entirely unsurprisingly his views are of a piece with this moral regime he ingratiated himself with. He hated Brexit and said Starmer should have taken more action to ‘undo’ it. He warned the little people not to use inflammatory language about the rape gangs. And in his resignation letter today, he laments the ‘dangerous English nationalism’ of Reform UK that poses such a threat to our ‘values and ideals’.

‘Dangerous’ — he’s talking about the working classes, isn’t he? He’s talking about hoi polloi. He’s talking about the pissed-off of Wales and the north of England who last week initiated the latest stage of their populist revolt by voting for Reform. It is breathtaking how clueless Labour is. They really are content to wallow in the self-flattering and bigoted delusion that the working classes have only temporarily been enticed away by the demagogic trickery of Nigel Farage and will be back in Labour’s arms soon enough when a ‘fresh face’ is in charge. You fools. You are finished. Neither the turncoat from Stepney nor that ‘King of the North’ Andy Burnham will save Labour from what is coming – the democratic fury of the people they have betrayed and demeaned for far too long.

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.