Senior Tory "Very Supportive" Of Wes Streeting's NHS Policies
Andrew Mitchell was a Cabinet minister in the last Conservative government (Alamy)
5 min read
Shadow Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell has said he is “very supportive” of Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting's approach to the NHS and insisted he does not want to oppose Labour “for the sake of opposing”.
Speaking to PoliticsHome the day before Conservative Party Conference, after arriving back from a family holiday in Morocco, Mitchell said he was “delighted” the conference was taking place in Birmingham, the city of his constituency.
In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed not opposing Labour "for the sake of opposing", the need for his party to rethink the role of the state in public life, and the upcoming leadership contest.
Mitchell was first elected in Gedling in Nottinghamshire in 1988, lost the seat in the New Labour landslide in 1997, and then won a seat again in Sutton Coldfield in 2001. One of the longest-serving political survivors in the party, he is now the only Conservative MP left in Birmingham and hopes the Tories will learn the lessons from its “shattering defeat” on July the 4th.
He said it was important at this year’s conference to highlight that Labour had “bankrupted” Birmingham City Council, and accused the new Labour government of not having a strategy and “lurching into some very left wing policies and antics”.
However, Mitchell was also complimentary of some of the approaches taken by individual ministers such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who told Labour Party Conference on Wednesday that the NHS was “broken” but that Labour would reform it to “turn it around”.
“I'm very supportive of what Wes Streeting is saying about the need to look at the structures and improve the structures of the NHS,” Mitchell said.
“The Conservative government put a lot of money into the NHS, the record is there for all to see… We should say to the Labour Party, if you're going to look fundamentally at the National Health Service and how it should change, we won't oppose just for the sake of opposing.
“We will give you a fair wind to come up with your proposals and we will judge them accordingly. I'm not one of those who is seeking to attack Wes Streeting or the Labour Party on the NHS.”
Then-shadow health secretary Wes Streeting and then-leader of the opposition Keir Starmer visited a hospital during the General Election campaign (Alamy)
The shadow foreign secretary, who served as deputy foreign secretary in the last government, also made it clear he did not want to create strong dividing lines between the Conservatives and Labour on foreign policy.
He said he was supportive of the Labour government’s approach to Israel, Gaza, and the wider Middle East, believed there was “every indication” that Labour will continue to offer full support to Ukraine against Russia, and thought Foreign Secretary David Lammy would work “extremely well” with Donald Trump as an ally if Trump wins the US presidential election.
However, Mitchell said he believed Keir Starmer’s Labour administration is “one of the most socialist governments we have ever seen”, so the Tories needed to “exercise the proper role of an opposition” and prepare the next leader to become prime minister at the next election.
The former Cabinet minister said he hoped his party would start to fundamentally rethink the role of the state in public life and how it is funded over the next 10-20 years, “instead of continually trying to get a quart out of a pint pot”.
“We want low tax and American-style taxation on the one hand, but we also want very high social provision as in the European model – and that's a very difficult circle to square,” he said.
As thousands of members and activists head to the Tory conference in Birmingham this weekend, the leadership contest will take centre stage, with Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, and Tom Tugendhat all still in the running.
Mitchell, who said he was “friends” with all the contenders, admitted he had been voting so far to “keep people in the contest” rather than for any particular favourite, and said he will decide who to vote for next based on their performance at conference.
“I bear the marks from 2005 when I was running David Davis’s campaign,” Mitchell explained.
“We arrived at the party conference as the clear favourite and left four days later with David Cameron having become the clear favourite.”
David Davis posed for photos with supporters of his leadership campaign at the 2005 Conservative Party Conference (Alamy)
The party’s interim chair Richard Fuller told The Guardian this week that the Conservative Party needed to connect to “all parts of society” and encouraged the leadership contenders to “look at those areas which have traditionally been returning Conservative MPs” rather than just thinking about “marginal voters”. His comments echoed concerns by others in the party that the four candidates have edged towards the right in an effort to win back Reform UK voters.
On Friday, former Conservative Party chairwoman Baroness Warsi – who was Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister – resigned from the party in the House of Lords, accusing it of moving to the “far right” and of “hypocrisy and double standards in its treatment of different communities”.
Mitchell described Reform as a “political movement rather than a party” and said that the Conservatives should come up with right policy solutions to the issues identified by Reform.
“Sayeeda [Warsi] has always been quite edgy and outspoken within the Conservative Party, so her comments aren't an enormous surprise,” Mitchell added.
“But I think the key thing to recognise is that the leadership of the Conservative Party has made it absolutely clear that there is no place whatsoever in our party for Islamophobia or anti-semitism, and we are a party open to everyone in Britain, regardless of their background.”
Despite reports that the Tory conference is struggling to attract major business sponsors this year, Mitchell insisted there “a lot of businesses coming”, and has got a packed agenda himself that will include attending receptions with foreign delegates and NGOs, and speaking at fringe events on cleaning up UK finance and economic crime, tackling climate change, and stopping migration through Europe at its source.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
