If Wes Streeting pulls off a successful reform of the NHS, he’ll be a hero but…

...if he fails, Labour traditionalists will eat him alive, writes John Rentoul

Labour leader Keir Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting visit Kings Mill Hospital in the East Midlands on Monday (Jacob King/PA Wire)

When Labour has so few distinct policies, Wes Streeting’s plan to use private companies to provide NHS care stands out. It is a classic Blairite policy: a radical market-based model of reform of a public service in its own right, but also designed to attract attention by offending Labour traditionalists.

Just as Tony Blair was often accused of using conflict with his own party to dramatise his pitch to Conservative-minded voters, so Streeting deliberately provoked “middle-class lefties” as a way of gaining headlines.

I once asked him if he was being needlessly confrontational – on that occasion with the health service unions – and he replied disarmingly that “no one would report it, otherwise”. Just as yesterday, when asked why he set out his ideas in The Sun, a newspaper hated by many party members, he said he made “no apology whatsoever for making sure that the widest possible audience is hearing Labour’s alternative”.