Labour / My encounters with Wes Streeting |
The Labour party seems to have ignored the advice I gave it in last week’s column, and so we are going to be treated to one of those down-market beauty pageants where candidates for the Labour leadership spend weeks talking competitively about the evils of Thatcherism, the nobility of miners and the perpetual threat of NHS privatisation. We might also look forward to watching the leadership candidates go for a jog, play football in an amusing manner and eat this country’s most disgusting foodstuffs as evidence of their authenticity.
One of the candidates for this pie-eating competition is the now-resigned health secretary Wes Streeting. And on this particular candidate I have some history to narrate.
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I first encountered Streeting many years ago, after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been narrowly prevented from blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day2009. The ‘underwear bomber’, as he became known, almost succeeded in setting off a bomb which, if he had succeeded, would have been one of the largest mass-casualty terrorist attacks to date.
Wes entered the picture because Abdulmutallab had until recently been a student at University College London. At the time, Streeting was the head of the National Union of Students – an organisation well known for its usefulness as a conveyor-belt for safe Labour seats.
I was among those who were not especially surprised at what the........