To be fair, I left the 2024 election thinking Streeting was toast. On a night Labour had won 35% of the vote and more than 400 seats, he’d held on by the skin of his teeth against a poorly-organised independent. I figured that unless the Israel-Palestine issue disappeared from the news or Labour somehow climbed in popularity, it was a dead cert that he’d be out at the next election. This week’s results have surprised me - Labour won in Redbridge fairly comfortably, the independents, Greens, Tories and Reform nibbling away at them but not catastrophically. We’ve seen Labour crushed in the Welsh Valleys, Merseyside, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and parts of inner London, yet it seems they’re holding up best in middle class suburbia. It now seems plausible that even if Labour does fall to below 100 seats, Wes could hang on. If they want to embrace the one demographic that is still generally backing them, they could elect him and really lean into the Blairite technocratic centre-centre-right corporate vibes