EXTRA: Wes Streeting on his friendship with Peter Mandelson
Electoral Dysfunction
Sky News
4.4 • 764 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Health Secretary Wes Streeting speaks exclusively to Beth as pressure on the Prime Minister to resign continues to rise.
Streeting tells Beth that people should “give Keir a chance” after he claimed it “has not been the best week for the government”, and recognises there is a “febrile” atmosphere.
It comes after a weekend of briefing around how Wes Streeting is connected to Peter Mandelson over the weekend – and in this podcast, Wes Streeting exclusively reveals his Whatsapp messages with Beth, over the period that Mandelson was ambassador in Washington.
But is he at risk of suffering from ‘revisionism’? Harriet thinks commentators need to be careful when remembering what went on with Peter Mandelson.
Plus – how much weight does Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar’s comments have? He's called on Starmer to resign today, saying that “the situation in Downing Street is not good enough”.
We’ll be back on Friday with our usual weekly episode.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When an offender is released, the probation service keeps them on track, |
| 0:05.0 | so they can find a place to live, which gives them the stability to say no to old habits, |
| 0:12.0 | making them more likely to attend their supervision meetings. |
| 0:17.0 | And all of that ripples out to make the community a better place to live. |
| 0:22.9 | Search probation service jobs to find out more. |
| 0:26.9 | An extraordinary job done by someone like you. |
| 0:42.6 | Hello and welcome to Electoral Dysfunction with me Beth Rigby. |
| 0:45.5 | Me Ruth Eberton and me Harriet Harman. |
| 0:50.1 | And we are back on a Monday because it has been the longest weekend. |
| 0:55.8 | Politics is politicking and it is absolutely fat shit. |
| 1:06.3 | I keep thinking that the news is speeding up and then it just goes ever faster. |
| 1:12.6 | So let's have a bit of a catch up from the last pod when we spoke just a few days ago. Over the weekend, |
| 1:19.1 | Keir's Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has resigned. On Monday morning, his comms chief, Tim Allen, |
| 1:25.5 | walked out the door, and the Prime Minister is fighting for his life, fighting on, as as we're recording this, you've got the Labour leader in Scotland and |
| 1:28.1 | a Sarwar publicly calling for him to go. If you've not caught our Friday episode, |
| 1:33.4 | go back and give it a listen. It might be about a million years out of date, but it tells |
| 1:37.3 | you the story up to this point now, because it is all going off, all going off. |
| 1:42.7 | It is all going off. And I off. It is all going off. |
| 1:44.4 | And I'm in Westminster. |
| 1:46.5 | I've been it quite a lot, actually, in the past 24 hours. |
| 1:51.8 | Following every twist and turn of this clear crisis point for Kirstama. |
| 1:58.4 | So it's a busy weekend working for me. |
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