From primary school prison visits to the cusp of No 10: The unorthodox rise of Wes Streeting

As Sir Keir Starmer’s grip on power becomes increasingly tenuous, Wes Streeting has emerged as the most prominent of the cabal of potential inheritors to the Labour throne.

But could the health secretary really be Labour's best hope of keeping the threat of Farage at bay at the next election?

The 43-year-old MP for Ilford North has become one of the loudest and most forthright voices on the frontbench, largely appearing to embody the on-message mission beloved by Labour HQ.

Nonetheless, this has won him little support in other factions of the party who regard him as “too right wing”. He has criticised Jeremy Corbyn, whom he said he “always” believed had been “unelectable”, and has also rejected being called a “Blairite”, despite his closeness to figures such as Peter Mandelson, and having previously worked for Progress – the pressure group set up to support New Labour.

Despite his fervent leadership ambitions, he is not popular within the party. Research by Queen Mary University of London recently reported that around 48 per cent of Labour members consider themselves “fairly left wing”.

And this is reflected by just 11 per cent of the party saying they’d want him to succeed Starmer in polls conducted immediately before the Labour car crash of last week’s local election. This contrasts with 42 per cent of Labour members naming Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, as their first choice to take the reins.

Nonetheless, Streeting’s ambition is clear, and his reputation as a strong communicator has long been recognised as a potent antidote to Starmer’s inability to form a coherent narrative about the purpose of his administration.

Across the board, Streeting isn’t typical of most politicians.

There are few in Westminster who could namecheck the Krays, armed robberies, and their mother being born in prison when giving a summary of their family background.

His own path to Downing Street would be a far cry from the Eton-marked route trodden by so many before him.

Born in 1983 to teenage parents, who later separated, and growing up in a council flat in London’s East End, Streeting previously told the Daily Mail that he could trace many of his “views on law and order” – and his Christian faith – to his paternal grandfather. Streeting said he was a former merchant seaman, a “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps working-class Tory, who only ever voted Liberal to keep Labour out” and was “very proud of Queen and Country”.

The issue of law and order was one that loomed large in Streeting’s family history.

In his autobiography, One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry-Up, Streeting has recalled his maternal grandfather Bill Crowley, a “career criminal” known to the Krays – whom Streeting would visit in prison while at primary school – wearing a grotesque rubber mask while carrying out armed robberies, which he named Claude.

It is believed that Streeting’s mother, Corinna, may even have been born in prison, while his grandmother Libby Crowley served a stretch in HMP Holloway prison over an offence linked to her husband – where she shared a cell with Christine Keeler, the model and showgirl at the heart of the Profumo Scandal.

Describing his grandfather’s relationship with his mother as “toxic, sometimes violent”, Streeting also previously told The Times of how his mother entered an abusive relationship when he was two with an “extremely violent” man who once “dangled my mum’s younger sister over the balcony and threatened to drop her as part of coercive control”.

The man was jailed before Streeting was old enough to remember any of that period, and Streeting has previously described how his mother, after considering an abortion and “having decided to keep me”, was absolutely determined to prove herself as a mother.

“When I was growing up, there was always a bookshelf with books. She said, ‘I’m not going to let you be made to feel stupid in the way that I was growing up,” Streeting said last June, describing his “driving mission” in politics as being to “make sure that children from backgrounds like mine have the security and opportunity they need to realise every ounce of their potential. When you’ve grown up in poverty, and you’ve escaped poverty, it gives you both an insight and a special responsibility to help tackle it”.

But although Streeting himself has no memory of the violence of that early relationship, once he reached school in inner-city London, he described himself as “one of the sensitive kids, slightly camp and effeminate” with “the bruises to prove it”.

“By the time I sat my GCSEs, I felt like I had survived, rather than thrived, at Westminster City,” he wrote in The Mirror. With the encouragement of his teachers, a teenage Streeting applied to join a summer school at Cambridge University, which was run by the Sutton Trust charity.

Streeting went on to apply to Cambridge University and secured a place to read history at Selwyn College in 2001, where he would come out as gay in his second year.

He wrote: “Coming out in Cambridge felt liberating. Coming out at home felt terrifying”, but recalling eventually telling his father, he said: “It didn’t take long for us to deal with any lingering awkwardness in our usual Streeting family way: with humour. I felt loved and accepted.”

Quickly becoming involved in student politics, Streeting – who reportedly briefly quit the Labour Party in opposition to the Iraq War – first came to prominence as president of the National Union of Students, where he served two terms between 2008 and 2010, and backed the then-Labour policy of university fees at a time when this was opposed by the Liberal Democrats.

He went on to become chief executive of the social mobility-focused Helena Kennedy Foundation, and head of education at LGBT+ rights charity Stonewall, before working at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a public sector consultant. Entering local politics as a Labour councillor in 2010, Streeting served as deputy leader of Redbridge Council before stepping down after becoming an MP in May 2015.

Claiming to have turned down multiple requests to serve on Corbyn’s frontbench because “there is no way that I could have been a part of that”, Streeting in 2020 cited “fundamental” concerns over antisemitism, “a bullying culture” in Labour, Corbyn’s response to the Salisbury attack, and “the endless wishlist of promises that I just couldn’t credibly tell my own voters that we could deliver”.

Instead, while actively seeking to replace Corbyn, notably in a 2016 coup attempt, Streeting made a name for himself as a member of the cross-party Treasury committee, and was later rewarded by Starmer with a role as shadow exchequer secretary.

While he was forced to apologise after being caught calling Corbyn “senile” in 2022, and later calling him “an albatross around Labour’s neck”, he conversely said of Starmer in 2020: “He’s just a fundamentally decent human being, and that counts for a lot. He’s got integrity by the bucketloads.” The Labour leader in 2021 described Streeting as a friend as well as a colleague.

That affirmation from his boss came as Streeting announced – days after being promoted to shadow child poverty secretary – that he was temporarily stepping back from politics following a diagnosis of kidney cancer. While it “could have been the moment to throw in politics”, Streeting did the opposite and was promoted to shadow health secretary just months later.

A Guardian piece would later suggest that Streeting’s illness “turned him into the patient’s champion, one who simply will not allow the government to use the pandemic as an excuse for the now terrifyingly long NHS waiting lists”.

Since taking on the brief, Streeting has been no hostage to Labour convention on the NHS, frequently parking his tank on the Tories’ lawn in a manner which has made him no stranger to criticism from those on the left – or those in the health service, notably when he argued that GPs were claiming “money for old rope” during the Covid vaccination drive.

Since his first months in the role, Streeting has called for greater private involvement to help cut NHS waiting lists – but has insisted that privatising the health service “could not be further from my politics, values or aims”.

He also notably diverged from Labour colleagues by answering question on transgender rights oft-posed by right-wing commentators, telling TalkRadio’s Julia Hartley-Brewer in March 2022: “Men have penises, women have vaginas, here ends my biology lesson”, adding: “That doesn’t mean by the way that there aren't people who transition to other genders because they experience gender dysphoria and we should acknowledge that and conduct the debate in a respectful way that respects those people's rights and dignity.”

And in March, he stole headlines by telling The Telegraph he wanted the NHS to stop “being right on and doing daft things – well-meaning things – in the name of diversity and inclusion”.

But it is an approach that Streeting likely feels has served him and his party well, and would ultimately do the same for voters. On his position on private involvement with the NHS, he told The New Statesman in March 2023: “It’s pragmatic and it’s definitely popular with those swing voters we need to win over. I don’t think I would be able to look someone in the eye and say. ‘I’m sorry, I know your grandmother could get her hip or knee replacement up the road at a private hospital but my principles mean she can’t’.”

With Labour’s local electoral defeat sending shockwaves through the party’s ranks, Streeting may believe his time has come. Launching a leadership bid is a gamble that could easily backfire – not least due to the lack of esteem which Labour members at large hold for him. However, as Starmer’s own popularity plummets, Streeting may yet emerge as the most ideologically aligned heir to the keys to Number 10. What remains to be seen is whether he can scrape together enough broad support from the party to take the crown.