The opinion polls say Keir Starmer is likely to become Britain’s next prime minister, but many voters are still trying to figure out the man behind the Labour leader’s mask.
Some answers to that question may lie in a new biography written by Tom Baldwin, a “political correspondent steeped in New Labour legend”, said Robert McCrum in The Independent.
Though “unauthorised”, “Keir Starmer: The Biography” leans on “unparalleled access to Sir Keir and his inner circle”, said Ben Riley-Smith in The Telegraph. It starts to “flesh out a public figure” who has previously been “reluctant to open up about his private life”.
Here are five things that the new book has revealed about the Labour leader.
‘Complex’ family relationships
Starmer is “quoted frequently and candidly” by Baldwin about his childhood, said Riley-Smith, and his “adoration” for his mother, Jo, “shines through”. Jo had Still’s disease, which eventually led to her requiring a wheelchair, but her “energy and warmth were undimmed”, her son said.
His relationship with father, Rodney, was “complex”. The Labour leader was at his father’s side in 2018 shortly before Rodney died and “regrets to this day” that he “didn’t tell his father how much he meant to him”.
Rodney was “intimidating to some, stand-offish to others”, the biographer writes, but known to “have a good heart”. And despite his “surliness”, a “stash of newspaper clippings showed that Rodney had been quietly proud of his son”, said Robbie Griffiths in the London Evening Standard.
An “assumption of responsibility at home throughout his school years” may be why Starmer has such a “sober, sincere, public service-minded approach today”, said Riley-Smith.
The Labour leader feels a “real, deep sadness” for his brother Nick, Baldwin wrote. Nick, who has severe difficulties with learning, has had a “really tough life”.
Starmer’s ‘footballism’
There is an “absence of Labour theory” in the book, and with it “virtually no reference to political philosophy”, said McCrum. What Baldwin does analyse, however, is Starmer’s “footballism”, and how the game has “shaped his understanding of the English voters’ sense of place” and “identity”.
An Arsenal fan who regularly attends games at the Emirates Stadium in London, Starmer also frequently plays football on Sundays with “old friends who have nothing to do with Westminster” near his home in Kentish Town, north London. These games help to “keep his feet on the ground”.
Politicians who “play the football card” may make “cynical commentators recoil in horror”, said McCrum. But the biographer seems convinced that football is the driving force behind Starmer’s “pragmatic reluctance to be pigeonholed ideologically” and his “dedication to the art of winning”.
‘No smoking gun’
The book paints a portrait of a man with a “fiercely competitive desire to win” who is “willing to do whatever it takes”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. But anyone “hoping to find these pages spattered with blood” will be disappointed, Baldwin said.
The biography reveals no “uncharacteristically juicy” scandals “lurking” in Starmer’s history, Hinsliff said. And there is “no smoking gun” from his time as director of public prosecutions to be found either.
The biographer describes Starmer’s time at the Crown Prosecution Service as “one of diligently prosecuting sexual abuse cases previously treated as too difficult”.
Brexit, Corbyn and leadership
Diving into politics at the age of 52, Starmer assumed he might have “quickly” become a minister had Labour won the 2015 election, wrote Andrew Marr in The New Statesman. Instead, the next five years in opposition felt “like a prison sentence”, Starmer recalled.
This “sense of powerlessness was reinforced” by Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader and by Brexit, said Marr. Starmer “did not admire Corbyn personally” and only stayed in his role to “wage a parliamentary fight for a softer Brexit”, according to the biography.
The book “convincingly argues”, according to Marr, that Starmer was “no enthusiast for reversing Brexit”. Still, he sparked “furious reactions” from Corbyn’s team when he put Remain as an option in a second referendum without authorisation, said Marr. It was seen by Tories as a “cynical trick” to “prepare for a leadership contest”. Starmer says it was his attempt to “fix the problem”.
His “careful” and “quietly planned” push to become leader was in the works even before Labour’s 2019 general election defeat, said Marr. By then, Starmer was prepared to “woo members by talking left” and then “ditch the commitments he made” once he’d taken control of the party.
Close to resigning
Starmer had to be “persuaded to stay” after a by-election defeat. Labour lost the Hartlepool constituency in 2021, a seat it had held since 1974. Starmer told “close aides in the immediate aftermath” that he would step down before they convinced him to stay, said Nadeem Badshah in The Guardian.
Chris Ward, a former aide, told Baldwin that Starmer had decided to stand down because he saw the result as “a personal rejection”, and a sign that “the party was going backwards”. Starmer’s wife, Victoria, was also “among those who urged him not to act too hastily” in the wake of the defeat.
To Starmer, the defeat felt like he had been “kicked in the guts”, he is quoted as saying in the biography. It was a moment when he thought “we are not going to be able to do this”.