Karaoke star Streeting has sound bites ... but they’re no Greggs steak bake

Like Richard Burton’s vodka supplier or the Queen Mother’s bookie, being shadow Health Secretary is a plum gig nowadays. You just bang on about everything that’s wrong with the NHS. For Wes Streeting, there was plenty to shout about on the last day of the Labour conference, even though Sir Keir Starmer’s call to move his big speech to Tuesday had sparked an exodus of delegates, meaning rising stars like Wes and Rosina Allin-khan addressed a rather depleted, and wanly hungover, conference hall.

And shout he did; barking out a laundry list of appalling statistics.

Millions unable to see their GP. Record waiting lists. A Cornish pensioner forced to wait 15 hours in a makeshift shelter outside his home before an ambulance arrived – complete with a powerpoint slide of the shelter for maximum pathos. The dastardly Tories had bled the NHS dry, he said, ignoring the eye-watering billions sunk into it in recent years. The audience defied hangovers to whoop delightedly, adding a hysterical edge to Wes’s final salvoes. By the end, the poor Cornishman’s plight had been upgraded to “waiting 15 years” for an ambulance.

He excelled at the whingeing part – and no wonder, given the state of the health service, and his opponents. But instead of solutions he delivered Blairite platitudes (“politics is about choices”) and promises of as-yetunspecified reform. He earnestly pledged to conjure up a vast workforce of doctors, nurses, midwives and mental health workers – and all by reversing a tax cut for the wealthiest, which hasn’t happened yet.

This felt like a return to Miliband 2015 territory, when half of Labour’s spending commitments would be funded by that fabled tax on bankers’ bonuses. “The cavalry is coming”, he boomed, to thunderous applause. Whose, Lord Cardigan’s? Unsurprisingly, Streeting will sometimes try to back both horses at once. When the Labour leader’s stock was plummeting a few months ago, he wooed the trade unions by coming out batting for the RMT strikers in defiance of Starmer. But with his party now in rude health, he’d changed his tune, metaphorically and literally.

Videos emerged from the Labour karaoke night of Streeting blasting out Robbie Williams’s Angels, but with the lyrics fawningly switched to “I’m loving Starmer instead”.

Groan.

His latest attempt to bridge Labour’s Left-right divide involved co-opting trade union lingo with a consumer bent; pledging to be the “shop steward” for patients. That’s all well and good, but one imagines the doctors’ union might have something to say about it.

For Labour top brass, praising the NHS presents something of a philosophical dilemma. This is Schrödinger’s health service; simultaneously the envy of the world yet also perpetually on its knees. Here, Wes lauded it more slavishly than most.

The NHS, he gushed, wasn’t just “Labour’s greatest achievement” but “Britain’s”. Never mind parliamentary democracy or Shakespeare. In fact, scratch that – the invention of the Greggs steak bake probably edges it over our ropey health service for well-being at least.

The shadow Health Secretary may have waxed eloquent on reform, but these were not the words of one who would disturb the status quo.

By the end, the poor Cornishman’s plight had been upgraded to ‘waiting 15 years’ for an ambulance