EMQs: Is Wes Streeting a good health secretary?
Political Currency
Persephonica
4.1 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fellow ex-MP and former health minister Steve Brine sends in a question asking Ed Balls and George Osborne how we judge the performance of a health secretary, and in particular Wes Streeting. They lay out the historical challenges of the role, and where Streeting has risen or succumbed to them thus far.
A colleague of Ed’s from King’s College then asks how useful it is for benefits to be so conditional, in particular for care leavers. They debate the fairness in having conditional benefits systems, and why people are more sympathetic to care leavers than other disadvantaged groups.
They then discuss the perks of pedestrianising Bruton, George’s stomping ground, in a manner similar to Paris. Would George lead the campaign to see this through? Or is it an enticing but unrealistic idea?
Finally, a former Tory parliamentary candidate raises his concerns around Nick Timothy’s controversial comments on a Ramadan event in London. They discuss the dangerous direction these comments represent for both the Tories, and British politics more widely.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Chancellor of the Exchequer. |
| 0:02.0 | Getting a lesson from the Shadow Chancellor in how to balance the books, |
| 0:05.0 | it's like getting a lesson from Dracula and how to look after a blood pack. |
| 0:08.0 | Ed Balls. |
| 0:10.0 | As steady as she goes, budget. |
| 0:13.0 | What kind of ship does he think he's on, the Titanic? |
| 0:16.0 | Themary Celeste. |
| 0:17.0 | Welcome to EMQs from Political Currency |
| 0:20.0 | with Ed Balls and George Osborne. |
| 0:27.5 | So hello and welcome to EMQ's ex-minister's questions and this is our final pre-Easter question session before, you know, Parliament will be going into the cess, and so is |
| 0:39.2 | political currency. But we're not, George, denying our listeners, the Easter delights of our |
| 0:44.8 | podcast, is just going to be changing somewhat. Yeah, that's right, because we are going to do |
| 0:49.3 | one of our Inside the Rooms, which is often over several episodes, and I think we'll be over this. |
| 0:54.5 | We haven't recorded it yet, but we are about to. |
| 0:57.3 | And it's going to be about the campaign in Libya in 2011. |
| 1:02.5 | So we're going to be speaking to some of the key participants in that. |
| 1:07.0 | And of course, there's some echoes with what's going on in the world at the moment in the Middle East. |
| 1:10.2 | But for those who've listened before to, for example, are inside the room on the Scottish referendum with Nicholas Sturgeon or the Brexit referendum with Michael Gove or the first few months of the Cameron premiership with David Cameron. |
| 1:24.9 | You know, you'll know we go through it in some detail so that people really |
| 1:28.0 | understand what it's like to make decisions in real time, how government makes decisions. |
| 1:32.8 | But this is quite interesting. The first time we've done a kind of armed conflict, isn't it? |
| 1:36.3 | Where there's a kind of fusion of the politics with the military and the spies and foreign |
... |
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