Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin

Keir Starmer: The Biography 

By Tom Baldwin

William Collins 2024

It was to the incandescence of the British left when the late Martin Amis described Jeremy Corbyn’s humourlessness as “a want of elementary nous” rather than a tolerable personality flaw. Corbyn’s successor as Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, has faced these same imputations. Tom Baldwin’s new unauthorised biography of this ponderous Labour leader avowedly seeks to apprehend the paradox between a likeable but meek man who many still find “hard to fathom”. Baldwin knows that access to a high-ranking politician, whose electoral triumph looks ever more likely, is both a rare and delicate honour. 

It is in Baldwin’s assessment of the characters and cornerstones hovering about Starmer’s periphery that he best accentuates his skills of appraisal and description. His machinist father “looks like a cross between a Victorian patriarch and an American frontiersman” and his long-suffering, physically disabled mother “[achieves] a first-class degree in sociology…whilst studying at home and bringing up four children.” When approximating some of the more auspicious Labour Party leaders, we learn of Harold Wilson who “alchemised his past into the story of a meritocratic society” and Tony Blair who “fashioned a wand from his Tory background and private education.” The perfidious and blundersome Boris Johnson is a “louche and irreverent celebrity-cum-jounalist” whilst the dusty topics of human rights and conservative euroscepticism are duly enlivened. “Winston Churchill,” Baldwin explains, “helped enshrine human rights into the European-wide convention from which so many in that party now wish to resile.” This is the calm confidence of a political topographer giving the uninitiated a helpful lay of the land. 

Baldwin’s presentation of Starmer, hardly given a fair hearing in a lowly four hundred pages, is paradigmatic of the deft, compassionate, if slightly mournful man whose funereal sheepishness adorns the front cover. Readers have raspberries blown at them by a long-haired street fighter striding about the football field when others play rugger. It is discernible, however, that his overstatement of Starmer’s laddishness proves the detractors’ points. They are both so desperate to repudiate the notions of his being a goody-goody box-ticker (telling us how Keir paraded around school “with the top buttons of his shirt undone”) which sounds like two virgins trying to arouse an audience with the details of an intimate kiss. 

It is to our relief and a testament to his wisdom that Baldwin soon gets on with tracking Starmer’s legal career, his ambling tardiness in becoming an MP in his fifties, and his observable suitability for high office. He repeatedly stresses Keir’s drive and near servile attitude to the completion of work; a student “so obsessed with his books, so buried in his texts, he didn’t notice two burglars walking around the house.” Time and again the assiduous human rights lawyer puts his nose to the grindstone. An explanation of his more radical past - now apparently abandoned - reads more like the maturation of a pragmatist than the sweeping of incriminating documents under the carpet. But beyond the restless worker who was “willing to drop everything and fly out at short notice for death penalty work” there is no coverage of the factors leading to his lionisation as Director of Public Prosecutions. 

The investigation of Starmer as the duplicitous issuer of false promises is alarming and enlightening. Pledges of red meat tossed to the Corbynites during his leadership election are expanded upon in a relentless display of well-voiced criticism. “Measures he has since dropped” says Baldwin “include…common ownership of Royal Mail, energy and water, defending the free movement of people in Europe, higher taxes for the richest and the abolition of student tuition fees.” This dirty laundry and its proximate paragraphs of disapproval reinstate the author as a firm analyst rather than the mawkish, mindless fellow traveller it would have been so easy to resemble. 

Keir Starmer: The Biography is everything we might expect from a consummate professional and “a pro-Labour journalist”. It isn’t the magniloquent, pseudo-intellectual snooze-fest (probably subtitled “the glories of red Tories”) that will ensue alongside a Starmer premiership. It is not a chum’s starry-eyed poetical hagiography, nor is it an invidious hatchet job hammered out for the delectation of political bruisers. The abiding sentiment for this reviewer is of a stolid and reputable insight into a similarly reputable person “with little of the vanity or desire for self-aggrandisement” that has come to typify the goonish farce of parliamentary discourse, all laid out in a book ranking substance above style. Baldwin comes close to admitting that Keir is not the lager-swilling back-slapper wowing us from the pulpit, attributing his mundanity to lawyerly indifference and self-abnegation. Despite this he clearly believes, alongside growing numbers of the British electorate, that Starmer is the honourable member the sceptic isle needs.

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull