Wes Streeting said this week that he felt he was “hitting up against a brick wall” when he tried to raise concerns about Gaza inside government, after private messages from Peter Mandelson were disclosed showing the former ambassador mocking his lobbying as “hysterical” and “pathetic.” The remarks landed as a public airing of something that had been building in private: a senior Labour figure saying he pushed hard for action and was met with resistance.
The dispute is drawing attention because Streeting was not speaking in the abstract. In July 2025, he lobbied cabinet colleagues on Gaza, and Pat McFadden later said Streeting had circulated videos and a note to ministers. That note was understood to be a 22-page dossier from three doctors, including two surgeons at prominent London hospitals, who described working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Streeting said he shared eyewitness testimony from doctors on the ground so their accounts would be heard at the highest levels of government.
The dossier was stark. It contained multiple graphic images of children, including babies with acute malnutrition and amputated limbs. One doctor said they were operating on up to a dozen children a day. Another said many children were screaming in pain because there were no available analgesics. The doctors said half the casualties coming in were children, and that they had never seen such extensive trauma on young children in years of working in war zones.
Streeting has tried to frame his intervention as an act of conscience rather than factional pressure. He said he was “horrified by the war in Gaza,” that he did everything he could behind the scenes to get the government to act with moral urgency, and that he and other ministers often felt dismissed when they raised concerns. He also said he supported Israel’s right to defend itself and Palestinians’ right to a state of their own, adding that he had met survivors of October 7th, was the first shadow cabinet minister to visit Israel, and had visited the West Bank a decade ago.
The private messages cut in the opposite direction. Mandelson told McFadden during Streeting’s lobbying that he had received “a wild long hysterical message from Wes about Israel,” said he pushed back, and later described the intervention as “pathetic.” He also wrote that he thought Streeting was experiencing an “early mid-life crisis,” while separately portraying Keir Starmer’s Downing Street as “beleaguered and bereft” and saying the prime minister “lacks verve, as does the cabinet as a whole.”
What is still not clear is how much, if anything, the lobbying changed policy at the time. Streeting said he was proud to be part of the government that eventually recognised a Palestinian state, but he also said it took far too long. The messages now make public the gap between the urgency he says he was pressing inside government and the contempt some of his colleagues reserved for that pressure.
The disclosure is part of a huge release of documents tied to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US, and it has turned a private row into an open argument about how Labour handled Gaza, how seriously ministers took internal warnings, and whether appeals based on medical testimony were heard before they were dismissed.
