Who The Hell Is Wesley Streeting?
The Extraordinary Life Story of Keir Starmer's Challenger
Wes Streeting is strongly rumoured to be launching a leadership challenge to Keir Starmer within the next 48 hours. If you want to know more about Streeting, I recommend my review of his memoir, which I originally wrote for the August 2023 edition of Prospect. Streeting’s life story is truly amazing - his book would be a compelling tale even if it wasn’t by a famous politician. The book is also revealing about his political psychology, perhaps in a way he didn’t intend.
After the review, I give my thoughts on Streeting in 2026, and what I’d like to see him do in his leadership campaign.
One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up: A Memoir of Getting Up and Getting On.
Wes Streeting
There are two genres of political memoir: what-I-did and who-I-am. Retired politicians write the former: long, self-justifying accounts of life on the political frontline; why I did this, why I didn’t do that; why we needn’t dwell on that. Ambitious politicians on the way up write the second kind: artfully shaped life stories peopled by loving mothers and deadbeat dads, or deadbeat mothers and loving dads, in which trials, tribulations and triumphs illuminate the author’s most deeply held values and position on tax reform.
The model for the first genre is Churchill, who had rather a lot of ground to cover. We await Liz Truss’s contribution with bated breath. The second genre is more common in America than Britain and is typified by Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, with its fusion of the political and the personal. Keir Starmer was planning to write one of these but dropped the idea earlier this year, much to everyone’s relief (rumoured title: The Comfort of Low Expectations).
You might expect Wes Streeting’s new book to fit the who-I-am genre, since Streeting is ambitious and on the way up. In fact, it fits neither model. One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up is a memoir by a politician that is barely a political memoir at all, which makes it human, endearing and a little unsatisfying.
The fry-up begot the boy. In May 1982, Streeting’s mother Corinna was newly 18, poor and pregnant by her 17-year-old boyfriend, by accident. At the insistence of her mother, Libby, she made an appointment for a termination. The hospital warned her not to eat anything before coming in. But Corinna, who lived with her mum and two siblings in a three-bedroom council flat in Stepney Green, woke up that morning determined to have her baby. So she cooked herself breakfast. By the time Libby got to the kitchen, the plate was empty, and Corinna could tell her furious mother, and herself, that there was no going back. Hence the book’s title—and its author.
Nanny Libby, a chain-smoking cyclone of a woman, loomed large in Streeting’s early life. She was loyal, loving and ferocious. When she found out that Corinna had been abused by a boyfriend, she tracked him down and beat him with a bicycle chain. A tireless activist, she was heavily involved in campaigns against the Thatcherite regeneration of London’s docklands. When Rupert Murdoch relocated News International to Wapping, she joined the picket lines. A Labour party stalwart, Libby was invited to stand for the local council more than once, but always refused, partly because she was ashamed of her criminal record.
