Wes Streeting has said he felt he was “hitting a brick wall” when he tried to raise concerns about Gaza in the government, after Peter Mandelson’s private messages were revealed where he was accused of being “paranoid” about the issue.
Amid a major release of documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US, WhatsApp messages showed Mandelson was highly critical of Streeting, another cabinet minister, Pat McFadden.
In the messages, Mandelson discussed Streeting’s lobbying of the government to take action on Gaza in July 2025, when he was Health Secretary. Mandelson said he received “a wild long hysterical message from Wes about Israel. I pushed back. I can go on but in my view it reflects very poorly on his maturity.”
McFadden said several days later that Streeting had circulated the video and a note to the Cabinet on Gaza, believed to be a document from three doctors, including two surgeons from major London hospitals, all of whom described their experiences of working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment.
Mandelson described Streeting’s intervention as “pathetic” and added: “I think Wes is experiencing an early midlife crisis.”
In a statement to the Guardian, Streeting said he was “horrified by the war in Gaza”. He added: “In government, I did everything I could behind the scenes to ensure that the government could act with the moral urgency that the conflict demands. This included sharing the eyewitness testimony of doctors on the ground in Gaza, whose accounts needed to be heard at the highest levels of government to ensure that what was happening in Gaza was not a war without witnesses.
“I was by no means the only cabinet minister pushing for action, but we often felt like we were hitting a brick wall. Our concerns and objectives were dismissed.
“I have always supported Israel’s right to defend itself and the Palestinians’ right to their own state. I have met survivors of 7 October and was the first shadow cabinet minister to visit Israel. I visited the West Bank a decade ago, when I was a backbencher I called for sanctions on Israeli settlements – this was not an emotional or one-sided response, this is what I and other ministers believe.
“I was proud to be part of the government that finally recognized Palestinian statehood, but it took us a very long time to get there.”
Streeting’s 22-page dossier, shown to fellow ministers by the Guardian, included numerous graphic images of children, including babies with severe malnutrition and severed limbs.
In the report, one doctor described operating on a dozen children a day, many of whom were screaming in pain because no analgesics were available. They said half of the dead were children, and all said they had never seen such widespread trauma inflicted on young children in their years of working in war zones.
In other messages between Mandelson and McFadden, Mandelson described Keir Starmer’s Downing Street as “troubled and lacking”, and on another occasion said the Prime Minister “lacks courage just like the entire Cabinet”.
In a message to Mandelson, McFadden told Labor MPs about his then-role in the Cabinet Office: “The thing I have in every meeting is: ‘What can we tax to benefit others?’ They are asking the wrong questions.”
Speaking to the media on Tuesday morning, Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the messages were “embarrassing” but were in the public domain due to the government’s commitment to follow the polite address motion passed by MPs in February to release all relevant information about Mandelson’s appointment.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, referring to former Health Secretary Alan Milburn’s report on tackling youth unemployment: “(McFadden’s) approach is not always about emphasizing the profit side, but giving people opportunities, and that’s what you’ve seen over the last week.”
Asked about the culture of demanding more spending on benefits in the parliamentary party, Thomas-Symonds said, “That’s not my experience, obviously Pat is talking about the meetings he’s been in. That’s not my experience.”
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