The Daily Telegraph - Features
Want to know Keir Starmer? Read on...
Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
448pp, HarperCollins, T£19.99
(0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £14.99
★★★★★ When Keir Starmer’s father was taken to hospital in 2018, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary rushed to his side. Rodney Starmer, formerly a toolmaker, was a complex man: intimidating to some, stand-offish to others, though acknowledged to have a good heart. By 2018, Keir was a knight and Queen’s Counsel, but little on the home front had changed. As he tells his biographer, Tom Baldwin: “We hadn’t hugged each other for years… I thought about trying to put my arms around him in the hospital room but – no – it wasn’t what we did.” Rodney Starmer died shortly afterwards. Keir regrets to this day he didn’t tell his father how much he meant to him.
This story offers readers of Keir Starmer: The Biography an insight into our possible – bookmakers would say “probable” – next prime minister. Across 448 pages, Baldwin leans on unparalleled access to Starmer and his inner circle (“100 hours of interviews,” say HarperCollins) to flesh out a public figure who came late to Parliament and has been reluctant to open up about his private life.
Starmer himself is quoted frequently and candidly. This is most effective in the sections on his childhood: his adoration of his mother, Jo, a nurse whose energy and warmth were undimmed by Still’s disease, shines through. Rodney Starmer, meanwhile, whose relationship with his son reads as pivotal, resented how working with his hands was looked down upon by others.
Friends, relatives and colleagues all open up to Baldwin about the Starmers’ eldest son, the lad with the quick mind and sharp hair.
There are stories of riotous parties in a north London flat situated above a suspected brothel: Keir gave some of the employees legal advice. (He now jokes that living above a massage parlour at least meant “we didn’t have the kind of neighbours who would complain too much about the floors shaking or people arriving and leaving late at night”.)
It’s often said in Westminster that Starmer is a man of hidden shallows. Baldwin’s book largely reinforces that. The Labour leader has been a long-time season-ticket holder at Arsenal, remains a fervent football player, and still texts friends on a Friday night when he can’t make it to the pub. But there are revelations as well. We learn that Starmer wanted to resign after Labour was hammered
It’s said that the Labour leader is a man of hidden shallows – but there are revelations here as well
in the council elections and lost the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, just a year into his leadership.
Unusually for a political biographer, Baldwin has declared his hand: he was one of Ed Miliband’s most senior communications advisers during the latter’s Labour leadership. That fact is never hidden from the readers, but it does sit at the back of your mind. Would a former Miliband spin doctor have forensically interrogated any less laudable aspects of Starmer’s story – and so close to an election? Baldwin doesn’t ignore the obvious controversies, namely Starmer’s legal work advising criminals and terrorists, and accusations that he’s too uninspiring to be prime minister.
But the question, to my mind, isn’t settled. For the moment, at least, there’s plenty in Keir Starmer: The Biography to engage any reader who’s hoping to understand the man who may be running Britain come the end of the year.