How Australia saves twice as many heart attack and stroke victims as UK

Mr Streeting, often tipped to be a future party leader, has previously admitted he would “die happy” if he one day got the top job.

For now, he insists he would consider it a “job done well” if health secretary were to be as far as he gets – as long as he succeeds in “taking the NHS from its worst crisis in its history, to putting in place a serious 10-year plan for health and social care that people look back on as the turning point.”

At this, he focuses his ire on the Tories.

“They haven’t got the first clue how to reform the NHS. They have had plenty of chances, they’ve had plenty of health secretaries – five in the two years that I’ve been shadow health secretary. Their time is up, and the longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer patients will wait,” he said, accusing the Government of a succession of “clown shows”.

Complacency, in assuming the next election is in the bag for Labour, is the biggest danger facing the party, he suggests.

As for when he expects that election to be?

“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” he remarked, dryly. “I’d be very surprised if Rishi calls a general election early in the next year, but I think it is objectively in our country’s best interests to do so,” going on to suggest the current Government has no mandate for recent announcements, such as the abolition of A-levels.

“The tragedy is that for all of the changing of the guard in around the Cabinet table, it’s still the same dysfunctional Conservative Party underneath,” he continues.

“I think their conduct has been appalling. Their record of delivery has been poor. And their incompetence has been staggering.

“And I think that’s why actually so many decent lifelong Conservative Telegraph readers are now looking to Labour and I hope that they can see in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, a changed Labour Party that is able to offer our country the credible change that it is crying out for.”