What is Wes Streeting up to? For years – decades, in fact – the answer to that question was always, “He wants to be prime minister”.
The question itself was generally asked when Streeting was positioning himself in a manner that looked rather clever, rather strategic and rather like someone thinking not just of their current job but of their future prospects, too. Now that he is closer to that top job than ever before, though, the former health secretary is behaving in a less predictable manner.
Previously easy to pigeonhole as a Blairite, Streeting has, this week, proposed a form of wealth tax, which takes him much further to the left of his party than usual. He wants to reform capital gains tax to equalise the bands with income tax, a move that he believes could raise around £12bn.
It’s a different kind of wealth tax to the one espoused by the Greens, but it isn’t what you’d expect to hear from someone like Streeting – unless, of course, they were trying to endear themselves to a party membership that’s more left-wing than them and which is also far more enamoured with Andy Burnham.
The effect that Burnham has had on the whole Labour Party is quite extraordinary. As well as dragging Streeting across the political spectrum, the Mayor of Greater Manchester has also pushed the Government into new – and baffling – policy positions. It would have been inconceivable a year ago that the Treasury would be asking supermarkets to freeze prices on essential goods. But now that Burnham is running against Sir Keir Starmer, his brand of anti-market Labour politics is suddenly something ministers feel they have to take seriously.
Starmer is fatally weakened, though, and at that stage of decline where he will announce anything to buy time. Streeting is not, but he is trying to avoid the mistakes made by his Blairite colleague Liz Kendall, when she made her disastrous tilt at the party’s leadership more than a decade ago.
Kendall ended up infuriating Labour members by starting her pitch with a focus on what the country wanted, rather than what Labour activists wanted. It was a reasonable assumption to make – that having just lost the 2015 election, Labour might want to consider what voters actually wanted – but the party’s members were not emotionally in a place to face up to that. They were much happier to pay attention to Jeremy Corbyn – and, to a lesser extent, Burnham, who came second in this contest.
Streeting wants to talk to party first, and also has the luxury of that party already being in Government, albeit with an electorate that is totally furious.
But the problem with this strategy is that it does rely on Streeting having a realistic chance of winning, which many of his own supporters in Parliament acknowledge is currently pretty remote.
They do, though, wish he would at least act as an anchor to the centre ground, rather than drifting leftwards with everyone else. There is not yet a formal contest to succeed Starmer, but already some MPs are struggling with the expectation they will support Streeting, when he already seems like a lost cause. They wish that someone else might be able to provide that anchorage, though aren’t sure who it might be if Streeting isn’t prepared to.
Unlike Corbyn, Burnham is not an inflexible politician. He is often mocked for flip-flopping over policies, and so a figure in the Labour contest who stops everyone racing leftwards would not be shouting into the void in the way that Kendall was back in 2015: they could actually mould the way that the next prime minister does politics.
The former health secretary should also be well aware of the risks of changing his own position too much: his critique on resigning was that “this is a Government that lacks definition and also direction and vision”, something any politician who shapeshifts too much could equally end up being accused of suffering from, too.
Streeting says he has previously proposed this kind of wealth tax, and is also keen to remind the membership that he did resign from the Labour Party back in the Blair years in protest at tuition fees and the Iraq War.
He is not an unreconstructed Blairite. But he was, until this week, the candidate most likely to argue for the centre ground of the Labour Party. Now his fellow travellers are wondering who, if anyone, will provide that leadership instead.
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