The standard answer is: it depends. Cybersecurity is a HUGE domain with a lot of opportunity.
For instance, there are people who go threat hunting - they monitor network traffic and look for variance in there to understand what's out of the norm. For those folks, an in-depth knowledge of networking is valuable.
Perimeter security is important. That also involves a great level of knowledge of networking, packet inspection, and network monitoring tools.
Then there are people who are involved in application-level security. Having skills in multiple programming languages would be valuable here.
There are people who specialize in hardening devices themselves and device security. In that case, knowing Linux and Windows security at a deep level, along with a basic understanding of networking, is valuable.
There are people who do penetration testing. For them, an in-depth knowledge of networking and electronics is valuable, as well as psychology (to hack the human factor). Also deep familiarity with known vulnerabilities is important.
In some enterprises, administering the firewall falls under the Security Team. There, a good knowledge of Network traffic, ports, and a basic knowledge of known good/bad hosts would be useful. (That may be seen as an entry-level IT Security responsibility.)
In light of the above, there are multiple more possibilities that I haven't touched on.
If it were me, I'd suggest finding something to be excellent at. Once you have deep knowledge, that may transfer over to other areas. So if you are excellent at Python, the knowledge of how to do something programmatically would transfer over to C++ - you'd know what to do but would just need to figure out how to write the code. Knowing what to do is the hard part; writing code to do it is easier.
If you want to work in a medical environment, knowledge of HIPAA (in the US) is valuable. I assume that the UK has its own privacy laws, so knowing them for the medical environment would also have value if that's the route you want to go. There an understanding of an electronic medical record as well as database security would be invaluable.
I've read that Perl is, although not dying, also not as popular as it used to be. Given the choice, I'd think that staying with Python, which you understand a little of, would give you the quickest route toward understanding programming. The concepts are the same across platforms (the concepts behind if and loops don't change; only their operation and coding).
I'd welcome comments from some of the other folks here, but my first recommendation would be to find what you are really interested in and passionate about, and then study that. Find something that you just can't put down and learn the heck out of that. You'll be doing it 40+ hours per week and will always be learning more, so why not make a living at something you enjoy?
