Wes Streeting has never made any secret of his desire to scale the very summit of British politics.
When asked in 2018 who would be Prime Minister in a decade, the Ilford North MP answered: “It’ll probably be me.”
What would a Wes Streeting government look like?
Allies have said Mr Streeting has a comprehensive plan to change the country with policies on the economy, defence, health, Europe and immigration.
He has hinted he has a softer stance on immigration than the current Labour leadership, suggesting that Sir Keir’s “island of strangers” speech was a mistake.
But he has attacked the NHS’s reliance on foreign staff and refused to be drawn on potential fellow leadership rival Angela Rayner’s claim that the migration crackdown proposed by the Home Secretary was “un-British”.
Mr Streeting has also appeared to hit out at the Chancellor’s plans to grow the economy.
In private messages to Lord Mandelson last year, he told the peer that his party had “no growth strategy”.
When Lord Mandelson said the Government “doesn’t have an economic philosophy which is then followed through in a programme of policies”, Mr Streeting replied: “No growth strategy at all.”
But he later claimed that he was “happy to have been proved wrong” as he praised Rachel Reeves.
On welfare reforms, he has suggested he would be willing to fight with Labour backbenchers.
Plans to slash the Britain’s benefits bill by £5bn-a-year were torpedoed by rebel MPs last year.
But Mr Streeting has since suggested he would support scaling back welfare to boost funding for the Armed Forces, becoming the first Cabinet minister to support the plan.
During the Mr Streeting’s time as Health Secretary NHS waiting lists have fallen, despite ongoing strikes from resident doctors.
He has had no reservations about challenging British Medical Association union chiefs and earlier this year deferred plans to introduce 1,000 extra speciality training posts after junior doctors refused to call off a six-day walk out.
By the age of 40 Mr Streeting had already survived a cancer scare, published a memoir of his poverty-stricken childhood growing up in London’s East End and was being tipped as a future Prime Minister.
A fluent and effective communicator, he is seen as a champion of the Labour centre-right – openly patriotic and strong on law and order – who has been compared to Tony Blair, although he rejects the label “Blairite” as too divisive.
While his rapid ascent – from a single-parent family in a council flat in Stepney to Cabinet minister via presidency of the Cambridge Students’ Union – has attracted admiration from some, his unashamed ambition has also brought criticism.
Old pal’s act: Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Wes Streeting during a visit to meet hospital staff
Having been promoted by Sir Keir Starmer as one of the party’s rising stars, he angered allies of the Prime Minister with what they saw as his barely disguised plotting as Labour’s fortunes plummeted in government.
As health secretary, he has sought to expand the role of the private sector in treating NHS patients and clashed with resident doctors over their “morally reprehensible” strikes in support of an inflation-busting pay claim.
A committed Christian, as a young man he struggled with his sexuality before coming out as gay while in his second year at university. If he succeeds in becoming leader he will be Britain’s first openly gay prime minister.
One of eight siblings (including one step-sister), his mother was just 18 and unmarried when she became pregnant with him. Both her boyfriend (Mr Streeting’s father) and her mother wanted her to have an abortion but she refused.
Although his father subsequently embraced him, his relationship with Mr Streeting’s mother did not survive and she was largely left to bring him up alone during his early years.
It was not an easy childhood, and even growing up among working class children, he was conscious that they were “poor working class” and was stung by criticism from Tory politicians of single-parent families.
Wes Streeting arriving in Downing Street for a meeting of the Cabinet (Ben Whitley/PA)
With money always tight, they frequently had to resort to candlelight because his mother could not afford to top up the electricity meter while there were problems such as cockroaches from neighbouring flats.
His maternal grandfather was an armed robber who knew the Krays and was in and out of prison for much of his childhood while his grandmother once shared a prison cell Christine Keeler who was at the centre of the Profumo affair in the 1960s.
Despite their straitened circumstances, his mother was determined he should be surrounded by books and while he went to live with his father in his teens, he also pushed him do well at school and go on to university.
His opportunity came when one of his teachers spotted his potential and suggested he should apply to Westminster City School – a high-performing state academy from where he won a place to read history at Cambridge.
Arriving at university, by his own account, with “a bit of a working class chip on my shoulder”, his ambitions soon became apparent as he secured election as president of the Cambridge Students’ Union before going on to become president of the National Union of Students.
After a stint working for the Blairite pressure group, Progress, in 2010 he won a seat on Redbridge Council in east London and two years later was part of Oona King’s unsuccessful bid to replace Ken Livingstone as Labour candidate for London mayor.
In the 2015 general election, against the odds he took Ilford North from the Tories – with a majority of just 589 – on what was otherwise a night of triumph for the Conservatives.
Wes Streeting addressing the 2023 Labour Party conference (Peter Byrne/PA)
At Westminster he quickly caught the eye, even among political opponents with chancellor George Osborne – a noted admirer of Mr Blair – picking him out as a future star.
When left-winger Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, Mr Streeting was one of his most outspoken critics on the party’s backbenches, lambasting his failure to tackle antisemitism within its ranks.
Mr Corbyn’s replacement by Sir Keir following Labour failure in the 2019 general election saw the start of his rapid rise through the ranks of frontbenchers, starting as a shadow Treasury minister and entering the shadow cabinet in 2021 as shadow secretary for child poverty.
His progress was briefly interrupted when he announced he was stepping back from frontline politics after being diagnosed with kidney cancer but within four months he was back after a successful operation to remove one of his kidneys.
When Sir Keir faced demands to resign over claims he broke Covid lockdown rules, he rode to his leader’s defence, warning any potential rivals who thought about trying to “flash some ankle and to burnish their leadership credentials” that they were being “deeply disrespectful” and “hindering the Labour Party”.
His loyalty was rewarded with promotion to the key position of shadow health secretary – potentially marking him out as a future leader.
As Labour’s poll ratings sank following their victory in the 2024 polls, relations between the two men soured, amid fears among Sir Keir’s allies that Mr Streeting was plotting a coup, prompting the health secretary to demand an end to “self-defeating” briefings against him.
At the last general election, when Labour was riding a wave of support amid public frustration at an increasingly chaotic Tory administration, Mr Streeting faced a significant challenge from a pro-Palestinian independent candidate and won his Ilford North seat by just 528 votes..
His ambitions received a setback with the disclosure in the US of details of the relationship between Lord Mandelson – a close ally – and paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Initially Mr Streeting sought to defend his old friend, but as more evidence emerged of the closeness of his relationship with Epstein, he sought to distance himself from him saying he had betrayed his country.
Whether such associations will damage him now among members of a party keen to move on from its Blairite past remains to be seen.
