Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has been speaking at the Jewish Labour conference in the last half hour, and he was asked if Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to stay in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet was the right moral one.
Mr Streeting said they had the debate at the time – some chose to serve, some didn’t.
He went on: “I never denigrated those who chose to serve, and I understood what lots of them – particularly Keir – were trying to do, which was to prevent the worst and to prevent bad becoming even worse.
“And I never doubted for a moment where he stood on this issue, and any lingering doubts people may have had, I hope, have been addressed through the uncompromising leadership he’s shown since becoming leader of the Labour Party.”
More broadly, Mr Streeting declared that they must “never allow this party to be surrendered to the forces of the popular hard left, with the bigotry that it brings and the wrongheadedness that it involves”.
Turning it onto the Tories, he said those more moderate Tory MPs, that he described as “actually quite heavy on the lectures during the Corbyn period”, should “look in your own mirror at the dangerous forces of the populist right”.
He went on: “Because whether it’s hard left, hard right, Corbyn or Farage, they’re two cheeks of the same backside.
“And our country is poorly served if you allow our two main parties – one of the centre-left, one of the centre-right, to be dragged off to the extremes in the way we’re seeing in the United States of America.
“Never Trump, never here, and similarly, we’ve got to make sure that we never allow that kind of dangerous, hard-left politics back in our country again.”
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