On Wednesday morning, Labour’s Health Secretary Wesley Streeting met with ailing Prime Minister Keir Starmer for approximately 16 minutes. Perhaps a longer rendezvous was unnecessary. Streeting, a long-time favourite of pro-Israeli lobbyists and private healthcare interests, has certainly made his intentions clear.
By lunchtime on Wednesday, Streeting’s camp confirmed what the rest of the country already knew: he is going for Starmer’s throne. The Streeting coup was underway.
By Tuesday evening, a string of Streeting allies had resigned from Starmer’s cabinet in an attempt to force him out before Andy Burnham had time to get back into Parliament.
Zubir Ahmed
First, Zubir Ahmed, a junior minister in the Department of Health and former Personal Parliamentary Secretary (PPS) to Streeting.
Ahmed, the Labour MP for Glasgow South West, was also one of several Scottish parliamentary candidates to receive £10,000 from Labour Together in the run-up to the 2024 general election. The controversial think tank has been beset by scandal, and it was recently revealed that current board member Jonathan Kestenbaum, a Labour peer, previously served with the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.
Jess Phillips
Then, Labour’s Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips stood down from the cabinet, praising Starmer in her resignation letter as:
a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things.
She was referring to the same person who once said that the Israeli state “had the right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza.
Like Streeting in Ilford North, Phillips now sits on a wafer-thin majority in Birmingham Yardley. Furthermore, the disastrous local elections last week left Labour with a grand total of zero councillors in the constituency.
In 2020, Streeting endorsed Phillips for Labour leader and served as her “campaign chair”, saying:
Jess is the person to bring our party and our country together.
Just days after Labour’s defeat in 2019, Phillips and Streeting spoke together at the Limmud Festival at an event titled “Should the Jewish community (still) be worried about the Labour Party?” Limmud’s executive director at the time was Eli Ovits, a reserve captain in the Israeli military and IDF spokesman.
Streeting, Friend of Mandelson and Israel
In 2022, Streeting became the first member of Starmer’s shadow cabinet to join a Labour Friends of Israel-funded delegation to occupied Palestine. LFI also paid for Sarah Harrison, one of Streeting’s staffers, to accompany him on the trip. Anna Wilson, another Streeting aide, had a similar trip in July 2023 paid for by ELNET, the lobby group which organised a Peter Mandelson-led delegation in 2024 and is headed by former LFI chair Joan Ryan.
Funders of Streeting include:
- Jonathan Mendelsohn (through his company, Red Capital Ltd.), a director at private healthcare firm the Europa Healthcare Group;
- David Menton, a business associate of Israeli arms beneficiary Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, who is also a donor to and director of BICOM, a pro-Israeli lobby group that flourished under the leadership of former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons; and
- Trevor Chinn, who was a director, key funder, and central figure in Morgan McSweeney’s Labour Together operation.
Streeting once opined that “there wouldn’t be a Labour government” without McSweeney’s contribution. He has also been eager to defend Peter Mandelson in the past. Last September, he said that Mandelson should not be considered “guilty by association” for his close ties to notorious paedophile and likely Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein.
Mandelson, who Streeting has described as a “legend”, personally campaigned for Streeting in both his 2015 and 2019 election campaigns. In 2024, sans-Mandelson, Streeting’s vote collapsed. He now holds his seat by just 528 votes.
A choice between two lightweights?
Keir Starmer’s remaining allies say that he will stand against Streeting if he launches a leadership challenge. With a cost of living crisis, curtailment of civil liberties, and genocide in Gaza, the British public are to be treated to a showdown between two Israel lobby-backed political lightweights as they fight over the rotting carcass of the Labour Party.
Featured image via the Canary
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