Wes’ celebrating NHS wins, Starmer’s tiptoeing through a diplomatic minefield, and the Tories? Well, Richard Holden just handed Labour a gold star on prison expansion by accident. Read more in this week's Who's Top, Who's Not.
Top – Wes Streeting
Wes Streeting has been having a grand old time this week, basking in the glow of Labour’s latest NHS achievement: hitting their target of delivering 2 million more appointments a year, seven monthly early.
The extra appointments come on top of last week’s figures showing the total number of patients on waiting lists fell in December for the fourth month in a row.
While these figures are good news, challenges remain in other areas. For example, latest figures show that 73% of A&E patients were treated or assessed within four hours – well short of the 95% target. Wes assures us the NHS is “on the road to recovery”, with these figures serving as evidence.
He’s determined to provide “year-on-year improvement”, for example by opening new surgical hubs, community diagnostics centres at evenings and weekends, as well as using the private sector to cut waiting times from 18 months to 18 weeks, but only time will tell if he will be successful. Making all these changes will require more money, and to ensure that they have the funds to do so, the Labour government will have to succeed in boosting the UK’s economy.
Middle – Keir Starmer
While Wes was doing an NHS victory lap, Keir Starmer was busy navigating a geopolitical minefield: juggling defence talks with the EU, USA, and Ukraine. Ahead of a key meeting with European leaders on potential peacekeeping efforts in Ukraine, he published an op-ed urging EU nations to boost their defence spending—a move that conveniently echoed Donald Trump’s long-standing NATO complaints, though likely with fewer exclamation marks and less drama.
After Trump took yet another verbal swing at Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Starmer suddenly found himself in damage control mode, diplomatically rebuking the U.S. president and scrambling to reassure Ukraine that the UK still has its back.
This diplomatic balancing act has now left Starmer teetering on a tightrope as he prepares for a high-stakes White House meeting with Trump—a critical moment in his premiership where one wrong step could mean upsetting European allies, Ukraine, or Washington. No pressure, Keir.
Bottom – Richard Holden
Shadow Paymaster Richard Holden just gave MPs a masterclass in how not to submit a written question, managing to turn what should have been a simple inquiry into a political faceplant of epic proportions. Holden submitted a written question regarding the number of new prison spaces created under previous Labour and Conservative governments —only to receive an answer he probably wished had been lost in the mail.
Justice Minister Sir Nicholas Dakin revealed that the Conservatives only increased the capacity of the prison estate by 455 spaces during their time in power, compared to the previous Labour Government’s creation of 27,830.
To make matters worse, the numbers also showed that even the current Government had outperformed the Tories on this front.
This is only the latest in a number of political actions taken by the Conservatives trying to downgrade Labour, but the Conservatives are too busy licking their wounds for any of the challenges to Labour to succeed.
In the end, what was meant to be a clever political manoeuvre turned into an accidental endorsement of Labour’s record—proving that sometimes, the most damaging attacks come not from opponents, but from one’s own poorly thought-out questions.