A few days before Keir Starmer was crowned leader of the Labour party, one of his shadow cabinet colleagues, Jon Trickett, made this observation about the way he operates. “He just has this inner drive. I get this impression that he thinks he has been driven by fate.” This quiet sense of destiny and “innate hunger”, Trickett said, seemed to affect much that Starmer did, and how he behaved. “One of the things I have noticed about Keir is that you can be walking through the Commons, or wherever it is, with him in a reasonably comradely way and then, suddenly, he would end up two strides ahead. It is just how he is.” Yesterday the Surrey-raised 57-year-old son of a toolmaker and a nurse, who named their son after the party’s first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardie, emerged not just strides but miles in front of his two rivals, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, from the long contest to succeed Jeremy Corbyn.
The brilliant human rights lawyer who rose to become director of public prosecutions aged 45 in 2008 has only been an MP since 2015. But in a deeply divided party he managed to sweep up 56.2% of the vote, leaving Long-Bailey and Nandy way behind, on 27.6% and 16.2% respectively. Importantly, Starmer won a mandate across the board, winning the biggest share of the vote among MPs, members and affiliates. Many among Starmer’s own supporters and within his campaign team, who tied him ruthlessly and repetitively to messages about unity during more than 40 hustings, had thought early on that it would be a much closer fight. Some believed he would appear too “lawyerly” and wooden, while others feared that the left’s candidate Long-Bailey, MP for Salford and Eccles, would be propelled to victory by the pro-Corbyn organisation Momentum, which had the vital data on many of the 500,000 party members from the last two contests in 2015 and 2016. Another danger, his backers believed, was that Starmer, a London MP and star barrister with a square jaw and smart suits, would be seen in the Labour heartlands as another Blairite in left-wing clothing. But as it turned out, the left who had wanted Long-Bailey to win, including her union backers, fell out among themselves about how to carry Corbynism forward amid the post-general election acrimony, and her campaign never really took off. It was also not entirely clear how much she wanted the job and whether she felt forced against her better instincts to carry the torch for the Corbynistas.
“She went missing for the first four weeks of the campaign, which made everyone think she was wobbling, and when it started it was pretty much a disaster. By that time Starmer was miles ahead,” said one of her early backers. While Nandy impressed and won admirers, the MP for Wigan started too far behind, and was viewed as less tried and tested than Starmer. With the party shattered by its worst defeat since 1935, when the rebuilding process began, it was not ideological purity, flamboyance, or someone young and new that members across the Labour divide wanted – but someone reassuring and competent who they could see taking on and outshining Boris Johnson. And Starmer fitted the bill. Prominent names on the left such as Laura Parker, a former senior official in Corbyn’s office and a former national organiser of Momentum, chose Starmer and was followed by many other Momentumites. Parker, who had seen him operate in Labour’s Brexit sub-committee, said Starmer was “tenacious, forensic, diligent, intelligent”. His focus, determination and mastery of detail is something everyone who knows him observes. Importantly for Parker he had also, since the election, put forward a left-wing programme that for her was entirely credible, allowing her to feel it was a natural switch.
“He can seem cautious but the other side of that is that you feel you can believe the words that come out of his mouth,” Parker said. “He has said there will be no rolling back from a radical programme – and I, like others who supported Corbyn, backed him on the basis of the policy commitments he had in his 10 pledges.” One of Starmer’s supporters who manned phone banks for him said Momentum members came over in droves. “You could just hear them peeling off on the phone. They wanted someone who could win, people wanted someone professional – this came up a lot – and capable of governing as well as leading an effective opposition. They trusted him to do both. There is only a relatively small hardcore of the membership who think that ideological purity is more important than winning.” Starmer’s supporters deny that his campaign had been long in the planning. But he has been very careful in his five years in parliament not to make political enemies either at Westminster or in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency party – and to shore up support against potential challenges from the local left. Trickett, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, suggests Starmer deliberately avoided being associated with trouble-making factions in the parliamentary party, even when it was riven by disagreements over Brexit policy, which he was in charge of from 2016 until the election. “I am not aware that he had allegiances really, other than ones for temporary convenience.”
In fact his energy seems to have been spent on avoiding factionalism at every turn. In local Labour politics it was the same. Sally Gimson, an activist in Holborn and St Pancras, says that even when he was handling the Brexit brief in the shadow cabinet, Starmer had “never been too grand to come to the smallest fundraiser or support a tiny community group”. Lawyer Patrick Stevens, who was international director at the Crown Prosecution Service when Starmer was there, noticed the same approach when working with him before he entered politics: “He made sure he knew every person in my team from me to the most junior official and they all felt able to call him Keir. It was how he worked. In his first year at the DPP he went to every single one of its offices around the country and made sure he talked to everyone.” Starmer’s upbringing in Oxted no doubt shaped his views from a very early age. His mother was disabled and had to give up work because of a rare auto-immune disorder. He remembers spending many long nights with her at the local hospital. The young Keir was the only one of the four Starmer siblings to pass the 11-plus, which meant he could go on to Reigate grammar school. One of his contemporaries was Andrew Cooper, founder of the Populus polling organisation, who has memories of him as a popular and clubbable boy. “He was not brilliant in class, but near the top. What I remember of him does not quite fit with his public image now as slightly dull. He was very popular. He was often the one at the centre of the crowd telling the jokes.” Starmer’s more recent friends support Cooper’s view, insisting he can be the life and soul of a party. “He has got lots of friends. He is a huge Arsenal fan,” says Patrick Stevens. “He goes with the same group of his mates to a pub off the Holloway Road before every match. Keir also organises five-a-side games every Sunday and Monday. He sends out the texts and collects the subs.” Asked about his playing abilities Stevens added: “He is a midfield general ... with a silky left foot.”
Starmer studied law at Leeds University, where he took a first before graduating from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, as a bachelor of law. He was called to the bar in 1987. As a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, he took on a string of high-profile human rights cases, including the defendants in the “McLibel” case in 1997, which he worked on “pro bono” for 11 years. Mark Stephens, a lawyer who instructed him on many such cases before Starmer was appointed DPP, said: “He had a Rolls-Royce mind and a way to apply that mind that was wonderful to watch. There was never anything showy about him. He quietly got on with cases because he believed in what he was doing. If he had gone to the commercial bar, he would I think already be on the court of appeal and knocking at the door of the supreme court, if not already a shoo-in.” After becoming an MP in 2015 Starmer was appointed to the front bench by Corbyn to be in charge of immigration before resigning over Corbyn’s leadership in 2016. Despite this he was reappointed to the front bench as shadow Brexit secretary in 2016. While the eventual Brexit position which the party put to voters in December last year was a messy compromise, it was not for lack of effort on Starmer’s part. He had wanted a clearer commitment to Remain and a second referendum but had been unable to win the day with those around Corbyn. As he embarks on his leadership and begins to appoint his shadow cabinet today, it will not be Brexit that will preoccupy Starmer but rather Labour’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic. The new leader has won a handsome mandate from a party that has placed its trust in his forensic, tenacious approach to politics and the crises it throws up. The current crisis could hardly be bigger. In his statement yesterday, Starmer said: “Whether we voted for this government or not, we all rely on it to get this right. That’s why in the national interest the Labour party will play its full part.” The coming weeks will be a test like no other in his hitherto glittering career.