Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
“A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities,” Bagehot remarks in his essay on Sir Robert Peel.
Tom Baldwin says much the same, though at greater length, about Sir Keir Starmer, who is, we learn in this book, “both extraordinary and very ordinary”, a man with astonishing powers of application, but no unsettling signs of originality.
As I found in 2004-06, when writing an account of the early life of Boris Johnson, there are advantages and disadvantages in taking as one’s subject a politician who has yet to hold high office.
It is helpful to be able to go and talk to people who actually know him. On the other hand, one is worried one might miss some amazing revelation.
Baldwin, a former journalist, is aware of the danger:
“Perhaps a terrible scandal I have missed will be revealed. Maybe one will be invented or puffed up out of all proportion. Certainly, I do not claim to have discovered all there is to know about a man whom I both like and trust, but still sometimes find hard to fathom.”
Another disadvantage of writing about a man still living is that one may feel inhibited by the hurt one will inflict, not on him – he after all is trying to become Prime Minister, and must expect public scrutiny – but on his family.
In his acknowledgements, Baldwin expresses his gratitude to Starmer’s wife, Vic, “for even letting me through the door”. The price of such access is the obligation to behave well, which means not inflicting pain on those who let you to into the kitchen.
So in the 400 pages of this book we find Baldwin on his best behaviour, which he wasn’t in the days when he was a rough, tough journalist. Here he is in The Times in July 2004:
“I don’t know when I really started hating Boris Johnson, but I will try to tell you why…
“I hate him him because he’s been built up and not yet knocked down. He has defied the usual laws of gravity.”
One trusts some latter-day Baldwin is even now at work, in accordance with the finest traditions of the British press, on knocking down Starmer.
But Baldwin has put hooliganism behind him and will no longer cross the street to kick a Tory. Nor does he express in the deep, instinctive loathing Starmer feels for figures such as Johnson and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The profound hatreds within the Labour Party, and the ferocity of the street-fighting which led to the crushing of Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Momentum, are likewise played down.
Pretty much everyone Baldwin interviews is on their best behaviour too, and speaks in a curiously insipid way. We get a kind of coercive good behaviour: it would be bad manners, and impolitic, to express hatred for Starmer’s enemies, or to treat him with anything but “the respect that a serious, grown-up leader deserves” (Baldwin’s words at the end of his acknowledgements).
We are given Starmer the moderate, respectable, consensual figure who never says anything memorable but can be relied on “to put in the hard yards”, as he said yesterday while explaining why he is the man to get levelling up done.
In his speech yesterday, Starmer spoke, as he often does, of his father the toolmaker who “always felt, particularly in the 1980s, that he was looked down upon, disrespected”.
Rod Starmer was a difficult father, insisting on silence at meals so he could read the newspaper, for many years forbidding the acquisition of a television set (a man after my own heart here), inclined to be rude to visitors and unable to express affection for his four children, of whom Keir was the second.
Rod’s care and devotion were instead given in unstinting measure to his increasingly disabled but always sweet and uncomplaining wife, Jo, who while still a child was found to be suffering from a rare form of severe rheumatoid arthritis.
In about 2020, David Lammy arranged for Starmer to have a couple of talks on Zoom with Barack Obama (whom Lammy had got to know at a Harvard alumni event), whose own early memoir, Dreams from My Father, is about a largely absent father. According to Lammy,
“When Keir started talking about his dad, he got quite emotional, and Barack just came alive… He started interrogating Keir further and drawing on his own challenging background. Barack is one of the best storytellers around and he could see something in what Keir was telling him that could become the architecture for a genuine campaign: one where we could talk more about how too many people have been looked down upon by the Establishment.”
Starmer, Lammy and Baldwin lack Obama’s miraculous eloquence, but here is the story they are trying to tell, of a boy who followed his gifted, isolated, uncommunicative father in feeling looked down upon by the Establishment, and is determined to stand up for others who feel looked down upon.
In September 1973, Starmer passed the 11-plus exam, and recalls that for once his father came into his bedroom and said: “Well done. I’m proud of you.” This meant he went 12 miles on the bus each day to Reigate Grammar, an excellent state school which in 1976 opted to go private rather than be turned into a comprehensive.
Starmer’s parents were not required to pay fees: Surrey County Council and the school between them funded the rest of his education. He did well: captained the football team, studied the flute at the Guildhall School of Music, won a place to read Law at Leeds.
At the age of 16 he joined the East Surrey branch of the Young Socialists. It occurred to me while reading Baldwin’s account that deciding whether one is Labour or Conservative is a matter of feeling – that is the kind of person one is.
This loyalty may later be rationalised, but the original commitment is emotional. Starmer is not an ideologist: one of his strengths is that he cannot be pinned down in that way.
But he does have a very strong feeling of loyalty to Labour. That is where he belongs. At Leeds he was excited by human rights law: “the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] struck a deep chord with me – and it still does”.
It is tempting to dismiss him as yet another pious, self-serving North London human rights lawyer who speaks the language of class, and maintains, with his love of playing football and going for a pint afterwards, the ludicrous delusion that he himself is still somehow working class.
But that is to ignore his sense of himself as an outsider, a socialist lawyer from an unfashionable village in Surrey who has always championed the underdog, made his way at the bar by hard work, rose to become Director of Public Prosecutions, entered the Commons in 2015 as MP for Holborn and St Pancras, served under Corbyn, fooled the Corbynistas into supposing he supported their programme, and is now reaching out to voters in Middle England who find his lack of glamour reassuring.
Baldwin says that Starmer, during PMQs, “despised the way Boris Johnson used to catch his eye with what he calls an ‘it’s-all-a-bit-of-a-joke’ expression”.
Starmer is allergic to the theatre of politics. For him, what matters is getting stuff done. Whether he would actually get things done remains a matter for speculation, but it is a difficult aspiration to argue against.
The post Dreams from Starmer’s father: Baldwin traces the Labour leader’s anti-establishment outlook appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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