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