WES Streeting spectacularly failed to name all of Labour’s new campaign promises in an embarrassing blunder on live telly.
While Defence Secretary Grant Shapps smoothly listed his party’s five pledges, the Labour frontbencher stumbled, forgetting one crucial commitment.
It comes after Sir Keir Starmer last week unveiled a Tony Blair-style pledge card with the six key policies Labour would focus on if in Government.
Asked on the BBC to name them all, the Shadow Health Secretary said: “Economic stability, cut NHS waiting lists, 6,500 extra teachers, secure border command, Great British Energy, and… what’s the one I’ve missed?”
The scene turned awkward as he had to fish out the pledge card from his pocket to check the final item: cracking down on anti-social behaviour.
By Harry Cole, Political Editor
“I’M not scaling back our ambition at all,” said Sir Keir Starmer as he scaled back his ambition again.
A weird shadow election campaign began this week, with both the PM and the man hoping to replace him tearing chunks out of each other in speeches that could be given on the stump.
Except there is no election yet.
And with Rishi Sunak telling TV’s Loose Women that we are all safe to book a summer holiday, it seems there won’t be for at least another four months.
But they’re off and both playing the same old tunes — with Sunak declaring you can’t trust Labour to keep the country safe.
For his part, Starmer is very pleased with his new New Labour-style pledge card.
Tony Blair published his five pledges for the 1997 election to great effect, and they’ve taken on something of Labour folklore ever since.
The sort of people who think The West Wing is an instruction manual rather than a mulchy TV drama love pledge cards.
You would have thought that would have died a death when some clown advising Ed Miliband in 2015 told him to chisel his pledges into a whacking great bit of limestone, but no.
Yet could Sir Keir’s latest list of promises to ditch when they become politically expendable actually have the reverse effect to Blair’s?
Is his lack of detail and woolly feel actually less of an Ed Stone and more of a millstone around his neck? Hear me out.
Many voters may well think that it’s tea in England and time for the other side to have a bat. But taking that sentiment for granted is very dangerous.
It’s the Ming-vase-over-the-minefield time of the electoral cycle, Labour are ahead and they don’t want to do anything to cock it up. So no one is really saying anything.
Whenever they do suggest something of note — like Starmer aides floating the idea that keeping Rwanda flights going in office might not be the most bonkers idea ever — they tie themselves up in knots.
I get it. There’s a paranoia in the Labour psyche that defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory time and again.
The party’s history is littered with nearly men (and they’re always men in Labour).
But this is just taking the Mick — and the voters — for granted.
He then joked: “The annoying thing is, I was preparing for that question and I still fluffed it.
“I might as well just go home now.”
Asked about his gaffe while appearing on LBC later on, Mr Streeting said: “Don’t even go there. You have no idea how hard I’ve been kicking myself,
“I knew that question would come up, you spend time preparing for it, in the moment I had a total brain freeze.
“I think Keir Starmer is going to kick me on Monday.”
Tory Party chairman Richard Holden wasted no time in tearing into the blunder, saying: “Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘pledges’ change so frequently even his own team don’t bother to remember what they are.
“Like the British public, Starmer’s Labour front bench colleagues know he has no plan for Britain and would take us back to square one.”
