Keir Starmer was determined to make Labour electable again. By the time Rishi Sunak called the general election, he was able to tell voters: ‘I've changed the Labour Party. If you put your trust in me by voting Labour, I will change the country.’ Ros Taylor looks at the UK’s new prime minister.
‘He’s a hard bastard,’ Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s biographer, when I asked him for The Bunker podcast what people didn’t yet grasp about the soon-to-be Prime Minister. ‘Not hard-hearted… But the speed and ruthlessness with which he moves is breathtaking sometimes. And I think he’s extraordinary that he’s been able to do all that while still being seen as reassuring and a bit dull and a bit plodding.’
People watching the pre-election TV debates to find out more about Starmer did not see a ‘hard bastard’. They saw a man clearly uncomfortable with the 30-second answer format and who was visibly exasperated by the verbal slipperiness of his opponent, Rishi Sunak. Pursing his lips impatiently and struggling to muster the quick-fire ripostes that the debate demanded, Starmer was not at his best.
He has struggled to inspire enthusiasm in the British electorate. “My father was a toolmaker and my mother worked in the NHS,” he told audiences — details that were intended to show he understood ordinary people’s lives and was not ‘just’ a lawyer from comfortable north London, but which he repeated so often that they started to prompt sniggers. Starmer struggles on camera: unlike most politicians of his age (61), he came late to the demands of television. Even as Labour celebrated a record-breaking majority, his detractors pointed out that the party had won only 34 percent of the popular vote, and half had not bothered to vote at all — the lowest turnout since universal suffrage began. So cautious was the Labour manifesto that many people who wanted to see higher taxes and public spending decided to vote Green or Liberal Democrat.
‘I’ve changed the Labour party’
Starmer became Labour leader in 2020, after the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn had led the party to its fourth successive defeat. His policy platform was not very dissimilar to Corbyn’s. Most thought he had no chance of turning around its fortunes before the next election. Then the COVID pandemic made campaigning virtually impossible for more than a year.
Instead, Boris Johnson self-destructed, was briefly succeeded by the inept Liz Truss, and the Conservatives hastily put Sunak in charge. He salvaged some economic credibility but failed to improve Britain’s struggling public services. He also disappointed Brexit voters who thought immigration was going to fall when freedom of movement ended.
Starmer was determined to make Labour electable again. The party would not be afraid to appeal to Leave voters, those worried about immigration, and people concerned that it would raise their taxes. This strategy did not endear him to the left of the party, who felt betrayed.
When an inquiry found that Corbyn had allowed anti-Semitism to fester in the Labour party, Starmer kicked his old boss out. He systematically removed the hard left from the levers of power. MPs and candidates were subjected to intense message discipline. Talk of rejoining the EU, or even the single market or customs union, was taboo. He promised not to raise income tax or VAT. By the time Sunak called the general election, he was able to tell voters: ‘I've changed the Labour Party. If you put your trust in me by voting Labour, I will change the country.’
It happened quickly because, Baldwin says, Starmer is in a hurry. He is 61 and has only been in Parliament for nine years. ‘He’s impatient to get stuff done. It’s duty, not joy. He thinks he’s achieved nothing.’ He was able to ditch the baggage of the left because he “doesn’t have a fixed faction or ideology. He moves with pretty permanent values into places where he thinks he can do more.” This was why, after acquiring a reputation as a radical human rights lawyer, he switched sides and took the job of Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008. The move changed Starmer because started to see how human rights could apply to the victims of crime as well as those accused of it, and how the law can be deployed for different purposes. The Conservatives had a habit of attacking lawyers and judges when they believed they were interfering in the work of elected government, whether over Brexit or in the European Court of Human Rights. Starmer despises that populist tactic.
Baldwin concedes that the PM’s critics on the left ‘have a point’ about the way he tacked rapidly to the centre after winning the leadership. ‘That said, a lot of the left’s template is still there. Sometimes he can be a radical in plain sight.’
Perhaps not in plain sight. The Labour manifesto made very little mention of criminal justice or prisons, but one of Starmer’s first appointments was prisons minister James Timpson, a man who says that only a third of current prisoners should be in jail.
A private man
His caution and buttoned-up persona have frustrated some of his friends and allies, who say he is ‘warm’ and ‘funny’ in private and relaxes easily in a pub — often considered the test of a successful British politician, even if Margaret Thatcher never managed it. He holidays in Wales and the Lake District, beautiful but rugged and rainy parts of Britain. Unlike many politicians and senior lawyers, he sends his children to non-selective state schools: the only tax change in the Labour manifesto was the abolition of VAT relief on private school fees. He has insisted on keeping his teenagers completely out of the public eye, so that even their names are unknown to the general public. Baldwin says he keeps his private and professional lives as separate as possible because ‘once you start talking about your kids or friends, they become part of your brand. He doesn’t want his real life to become part of his brand.’
In his spare time, Starmer watches and plays football. He has a competitive streak, supports Arsenal ardently and, like numerous male politicians, sees parallels between a winning team and a successful political operation. “He uses it as an anchor to pull him back to normalcy,” says Baldwin.
Fixing the roof in the rain
What is Starmerism? It seems to be a deep commitment to British institutions, including the NHS (he said he wouldn’t pay for a private operation, even if the waiting list was long), and a commitment to the rule of law, justice and fairness. He sees it as his duty to restore the efficiency of institutions like the criminal courts, the health service after the depredations of the Conservative years. The government needs to be “back in the service of working people”, Starmer announced after his win. His ambition is to puncture the cynicism and graft of recent years and persuade the public that politicians are capable of changing their lives for the better.
This means new energy infrastructure and housing, which will be hard to push through: many property-owning Britons are happy to see house prices rise and will fight hard to stop building near them. Nonetheless, two of the new government’s early announcements were the lifting of the de facto ban on onshore wind and approval for three solar farms. Starmer’s support for clean energy is pragmatic rather than abstract. “His eyes light up when you talk about how you can unblock the electricity grid and get more cables from floating windfarms,” says Baldwin. The PM has a lot of things to build and a lot of things to fix. Perhaps that is why his father’s job is so significant to him: a toolmaker understands the painstaking diligence needed to get a job done.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.
