Already a subscriber?There is a story that Sir Keir Starmer’s friends like to tell about his response to Labour’s humiliating Hartlepool by-election defeat in 2021. Having lost the safe seat to the Conservatives, Starmer openly discussed quitting as the Labour leader, saying: “I’m not fulfilling some lifelong dream here.” He told his confidants he would be content to work in a bookshop instead.
By purging Labour of Momentum, Jeremy Corbyn and antisemites, Starmer has done much to detoxify the brand. Before voters go to the polls, however, they will want to be sure that they know what they are getting if they are tempted to vote Labour – and that means knowing more about the man who leads the party.
Starmer has so often referred to his father’s occupation as a toolmaker that it has become the go-to punchline for political cartoonists. Some of Starmer’s friends have suggested in the past that if he appeared lacking in emotion, it was a result of growing up with a parent who had a serious illness, which led a child to suppress their own needs and feelings.
Starmer has gone as far as to say that his father was “a difficult sod” who “drove people away” and had no time for other people’s opinions. Family meals would be eaten in silence while Rodney Starmer read his newspaper, and he only allowed a television in the house when Josephine took an Open University course and visited 77 times. They also became lifelong friends with Alfred Wainwright, the Lakeland author, after coming across him in the hills.
During his time there he went on demonstrations and gave money to miners’ families during the strike in 1984, but he refuses to answer questions about whether he took drugs as a student, preferring to say he “had a very good time at university”. It included dating Angela O’Brien, a fellow law student with whom he had a 10-year relationship.
He expressed similarly naive views when he was interviewed for pupillage at his first barrister’s chambers. Asked how he would defend a first-time shoplifter, he said: “Isn’t all property theft?” Victoria, who worked as a volunteer at Blair’s campaign headquarters in 1997, is a decade younger than her husband and was far more politically active as a student than he had been.
He has picked out one of his key achievements as replacing a paper-based system with a digital one, which meant fewer prosecutions were abandoned because of lost paperwork. It is this that he has cited as an example of how “getting the boring stuff right” can improve lives.One thing he did not do as DPP was prosecute Jimmy Savile.
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