INTERVIEW

Labour’s Wes Streeting on childhood poverty and battling homophobia

Few MPs are better qualified for their brief than the shadow minister for child poverty: Wes Streeting’s grandparents had spells in prison and money and food were scarce. But he has overcome a lot more than that in his life, including homophobia and cancer. Now he is tipped as a future leader of the Labour Party

Wes Streeting, 38, photographed in Stepney Green in east London, close to where he grew up: ‘I remember the money running out. My mum would go without before she would let me go without’
Wes Streeting, 38, photographed in Stepney Green in east London, close to where he grew up: ‘I remember the money running out. My mum would go without before she would let me go without’
MARK HARRISON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE
The Times

As a boy, Wes Streeting lost count of the number of times that the lights suddenly went off and the house was plunged into darkness because his mother could not afford to top up the electricity meter. “The candles would come out,” the MP says. “The first few times it happened it was scary, but the sad thing is that you become acclimatised to it as a child. You get to the point where you think, ‘Oh, that’s happened,’ and you just adjust to it and accept it.”

Sometimes when he got home from school the fridge would be empty and he had to walk half an hour to his grandmother’s house to find food. His mother was 18 when he was born; his father