Senior Tory "Very Supportive" Of Wes Streeting's NHS Policies

Shadow Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell has said he is “very supportive” of Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting's approach to the NHS and insisted he does not want to oppose Labour “for the sake of opposing”.

Speaking to PoliticsHome the day before Conservative Party Conference, after arriving back from a family holiday in Morocco, Mitchell said he was “delighted” the conference was taking place in Birmingham, the city of his constituency.

In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed not opposing Labour "for the sake of opposing", the need for his party to rethink the role of the state in public life, and the upcoming leadership contest.

Mitchell was first elected in Gedling in Nottinghamshire in 1988, lost the seat in the New Labour landslide in 1997, and then won a seat again in Sutton Coldfield in 2001. One of the longest-serving political survivors in the party, he is now the only Conservative MP left in Birmingham and hopes the Tories will learn the lessons from its “shattering defeat” on July the 4th.

He said it was important at this year’s conference to highlight that Labour had “bankrupted” Birmingham City Council, and accused the new Labour government of not having a strategy and “lurching into some very left wing policies and antics”.

However, Mitchell was also complimentary of some of the approaches taken by individual ministers such as Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who told Labour Party Conference on Wednesday that the NHS was “broken” but that Labour would reform it to “turn it around”.

“I'm very supportive of what Wes Streeting is saying about the need to look at the structures and improve the structures of the NHS,” Mitchell said.

“The Conservative government put a lot of money into the NHS, the record is