When friends heard I was writing a book about Keir Starmer, there were the usual questions: does he believe in anything? What’s he like? Isn’t he, they asked with a frown, a bit boring? The last of these was the easiest to answer because he really isn’t dull. Starmer is good company, engagingly funny and listens in a way that too many politicians too often fail to do. There is, of course, a long tradition of advisers (or ex-advisers like me) wailing on about how they wish more voters could see this or that candidate as we do. But the gap between the reality and perception of Starmer is bigger than with most, and it cannot simply be down to the way he sometimes closes in on himself when a camera is pointed at him, or how the online snobs – largely from the left – mock his accent and call him “Keith”.
The better explanation is that Starmer is complicated, as most people are, and filled with paradoxes. He’s the most working-class leader of the Labour party for a generation and also the first in its history to have the prefix “Sir” attached to his name before he got the job. He is a private and cautious man who has chosen to place himself in the white light of public scrutiny while taking some gigantic political risks, including one that ended the Labour career of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. He likes to think decisions through and sometimes changes his mind, but he has also been breathtakingly ruthless in overcoming more polished or popular opponents in the Tory party and his own. None of that’s dull; it’s just very difficult to define. And part of him still instinctively resists any effort to do so. He didn’t always relish the process of me writing a biography about him. Over the course of the past couple of years and dozens of conversations, I’ve had to prod or cajole him into talking about things that middle-aged Englishmen are not always comfortable discussing: an intensely difficult relationship with his father; a sense of separation from his brother and the sisters he left behind as he pursued a career in London; the source of a hard-driving ambition that one of his ex-girlfriends remembers as involving “not much reflection and no stopping … which can make life difficult for others around him because there really aren’t many people made of that kind of stuff”.
For most of Starmer’s life, he hasn’t had to talk or even think too hard about all of this. His identity was built around the three decades he spent as a successful human rights barrister and then director of public prosecutions. He never won a case on the basis that he grew up in a “pebbledash semi”, while the now well-worn phrase “My dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse” did not cross his lips until he was in his late 50s. At one stage, I wanted to call my biography of him The Unpolitician because he doesn’t fit the template of political leaders. His backstory is messy and flawed, and he has neither a grandiose vision that can be summed up in a three-word slogan nor the kind of charisma that for so long made so many think Boris Johnson was unbeatable. However, even if “unpolitician” had been a real word, it still wouldn’t have been a fair description of Starmer who, for all his misgivings about this profession, has learned how to become pretty good at it.
He is fallible and still makes some unforced errors, as he did in comments over Israel and Gaza last year, or this month in initially allowing Labour to stand by its candidate Azhar Ali over some awful antisemitic remarks. But separate the wood from the trees and the real significance of that last row is how he eventually did something I don’t remember any major party leader doing in living memory, which was to sack a candidate in the midst of a byelection he expected to win. But he has pulled Labour from being way behind in the polls to 20 points ahead. And those who dismiss this achievement as that of a “lucky general” are underestimating him in the same way many defeated opponents once did. If many of Johnson’s wounds appeared self-inflicted, it was often Starmer’s forensic and lawyerly scalpel that made the first incision. When Liz Truss was terrifying citizens and markets alike, Starmer provided reassurance where Labour would previously have offered only an alternative kind of fear. When Rishi Sunak initially seemed to be contesting the territory of centrist competence and decency, the Labour leader held it while Sunak was dragged into the badlands of the Conservative party’s wildest frontiers. Indeed, a testament to his success in transforming the Labour party and its electoral fortunes is that the biggest question hanging over Starmer now seems to be whether winning is enough. There are plenty of critics inside the party who are angry at the way he has abandoned some – if not all – of the “10 pledges” on which he fought the leadership election in 2020. Still more despair of recent retreats from an earlier promise to spend £28bn a year on green investment. Others suggest his efforts to root out antisemitism are being used to purge the left and that he has been captured by the right.
Part of the problem is that Starmer steadfastly refuses to place himself on an ideological spectrum or bind himself too tightly to a particular set of policies. Chris Ward, who was one of his principal advisers until 2021 and remains close to him now, told me: “One of Keir’s greatest strengths is that he’s never been from or beholden to a particular faction of the Labour party. I think that’s because – unlike almost every previous Labour leader – he didn’t spend his life in the Labour party and it isn’t his whole life, even now. It’s why he could win a leadership contest from the soft left, but now lead it from the centre-right. His focus is always on getting him closer to the goal of winning an election and changing the country – and he’s smart enough to find different parts of the party to get him there at different times.” But even Ward worries about the direction of travel. “The danger, of course, is that he ultimately ends up trapped by one faction or becomes isolated when the going gets tough. That’s always been my biggest fear. Whether he can avoid that in No 10, and finally get the chance to do all the things he came into politics to do, is the next big challenge he’ll face.” For my part, I think the argument made casually by a lot of people these days that he stands for nothing is well wide of the mark. The five missions he announced last year and which are still under-reported remain key to understanding what he would do. And each of them is rooted in everyday values based on friendship, family and football. The third is a huge part of his makeup and usually his metaphor of choice; when, for instance, he speaks of yearning for the chance to get into government and show what he can do, he inevitably describes it as “doing his talking on the pitch”. When he talks about watching Arsenal, there is a sense of this tightly bound man revelling in the experience of losing himself in a crowd. He can be almost lyrical about the feeling when a late winner is scored and “everyone stands up, hands in the air … like there’s a magnet in the sky above the stadium”.
But his values show themselves in other ways too. Talking about his schooldays, he expresses his disgust at how a friend of his was chucked out of his family’s home for being gay by a father who declared: “You’re no son of mine.” Later, the young Starmer got beaten up in a nightclub after he came to the aid of the same friend, who “didn’t do much to conceal” his sexuality, when he had been attacked by some kids who “decided the way to prove they weren’t gay too was by punching and kicking him”. That says a lot for a sporty teenager in the early 1980s, and those same values are obvious now when he described going to the same-sex wedding of his niece Jess in 2022 and reflected on the progress Britain has made from the old days. Then just six weeks later, Starmer told me of how he had got a nasty reminder of “how far we have to go”, after Jess and her wife were leaving a pub in the town where they live and work. “It’s a friendly place, small enough for them to know most people. It’s their manor,” he said. “They were hand in hand like the newlyweds they are, when three men came up to them. These cowards punched Jess many times, fracturing her cheekbone, for no reason except she’s a lesbian.” In cold fury, he tossed his phone across the table at me. It showed two photographs of her face: the first looking radiant and happy on her wedding day, the other almost unrecognisably swollen and purple after the attack.
Starmer’s anger over what happened to his niece, and – despite his best efforts with the police – the failure to prosecute those responsible, is an emotion you rarely see from him in public. But it’s impossible to listen to him talking about the horrific murders of Fiona Ivison or Jane Clough – cases he was involved in as a lawyer and prosecutor – or a more recent visit to a women’s refuge in Birmingham, without coming away knowing that his declared mission to halve violence against women and girls goes way beyond the usual banalities expressed by a lot of politicians. In private, he frequently shows grief and joy on behalf of ordinary people, who offer him a bridge back into a world that politics doesn’t always understand. And there is a real warmth in the way Starmer talks about the people and places that make up this country. One of his stories that stuck most in my mind involved being on holiday last summer in the Lake District when he took his children back to a cottage he stayed in with his parents when he was their age. “We knocked on the door and a woman was kind enough to let us in and show us around. She noticed our car moving and thought someone was stealing it, so I explained that was just my police protection team. Her husband started laughing and saying she hadn’t clocked I was a politician. She said if I told her that earlier she would have taken the chance to push me down the stairs,” he said. This may not be either the funniest or the most inspirational anecdote you’ll hear from a political leader, but it was worth recording because it shows the pleasure Starmer takes at still being anonymous within all that muddle of Britain where nuance and ambiguity may yet offer a better chance of progress and finding consensus than the most puffed-up vision.
It would obviously be ludicrous to suggest he is the only political leader to have family members, friends and experiences outside “the bubble” – almost all do and doubtless gain insight from them because even the most out-of-touch politician has a real life somewhere too. What’s more unusual about Starmer, though, is his desire to prevent too much cross-contamination. For instance, when he made repeated visits to his seriously ill brother in a Leeds hospital during 2022, he kept it secret. And, when he later stood up in front of a couple of hundred health professionals to make a speech there – typically a perfect platform for a Labour leader – he kept the media away because for him all that mattered was saying thank you for the care they had given. So when people ask me what the Labour leader is really like, my answer is always going to be complicated because there’s something quite extraordinary in him still being quite normal. He once made a speech where he talked about an “ordinary hope”. It’s the best place to start if you’re searching for some optimism. • Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin (William Collins, £25) is published on 29 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.