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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
72 July-August 2024
Starchy
Starmer
By Suzie Mélange
It doesn’t sound much
fun but Surrey-Kent isn’t
Acapulco
PROFILE:
BRITAIN’S BUREAUCRATIC INCOMING PM
Keir Starmer, a bureaucrat who looks at government as a
problem to be solved by missions, pledges and steps which shift
INTERNATIONAL
it’s SIR
K
eir Rodney Starmer was born in
Southwark South London in
1962, named after the first
Labour leader Keir Hardy, a
hero of his toolmaker father
though audiences have started to ridicule
the repeated references.
He grew up in a modest pebble-dash
house on the Surrey-Kent border where
they breed them soft and glottal.
His mother struggled with long-term
Still’s disease, a condition that left her
unable to walk for much of her life. She
was in hospital frequently at the end of her
life and had to have limbs amputated —
but always passionately refused private
health care. “It was formative. And
dicult, really dicult”, Starmer has said,
vowing he will never use private health
care, nor let his children attend private
school. His brother suered from learning
July-August 2024 73
lwys up to something s dodgy s he ever got
Starmer comes from the
Rishi Sunak school of
virile charisma
diculties. Starmer apparently defended
him from bullies.
Paul Vickers, who used to work at the
BBC was a childhood friend and spent time
at the Starmers: “I used to love going
there, it was always like a building site and
there were holes in the wall; there was bits
of masonry missing; it was always as
though they were trying to finish the house
but never actually got quite around to
completing the job”. It doesn’t sound much
fun but Surrey-Kent isn’t Acapulco. Keir
was always up to something whether it was
football or playing an instrument in the
house. He had the same violin teacher as
Fat Boy Slim.
Vickers told the BBC “there was always
shouting it was a very intense house”. On
the other hand, his controlling father
allowed no Tiswas or Starsky and Hutch
and Starmer has said, “There were many
times in which the electricity or the
telephone bill didn’t get paid”.
After school in Reigate where he was
nicknamed ‘Superboy’ Starmer attended
the University of Leeds to study law,
sporting what fellow law student John
Murray has called “a bit of a dodgy
haircut” with notes of Liverpool-then-
goalie Ray Clements, Echo and the
Bunnymen and The Smiths. It is a pity he
did not stick with it. It is better than his
current supra-Socialist slick.
Starmer studied hard but he also it has
been asserted liked to let that hair down.
Murray said they’d hitchhike around the
country to see bands like The Smiths. The
two friends spent one long summer
vacation in France getting paid to sell ice
cream on the beach: “We had to spend our
time dodging the police”, but when they
got rumbled one day well “there was no
sign of Keir Starmer –showing the signs of
an able politician he managed to avoid any
and the French authorities consider the
case closed with his reputation
unblemished”. Starmer went on to take a
postgraduate course in law at Oxford. He
edited a Marxist magazine.
He started work as a human rights
lawyer, and moved into a flat over a brothel
in London with friends where everything
was so crummy that the washing machine
fell through the floor into the kitchen
below. You can picture Starmer, Y-fronts
ironed, resolving that the hardly unusual
brothel-crumminess could be used at
some date to counter the closer to the bone
allegation that he was just a bore.
After a photo of him appeared on a blog
called ‘your barrister boyfriend’, Starmer
benefited from the following glowing
testimonial: “his manly hands are tightly
clenched, his eyes are wide and worried.
Despite all this we suspect Keir is brimming
with manly passion”. We can be sure he
was not. Starmer comes from the Rishi
Sunak school of virile charisma.
A rumour started that Starmer was the
model for Mark Darcy in ‘The Diary of
Bridget Jones’ but Village has been
assured that his blueprint was in fact
Bridget herself. He did act for 15 years on
behalf of two defendants taken to court by
McDonald’s in the so-called McLibel case,
the longest libel proceedings in English
history but Village fears that the length
had something to do with Starmer’s
wearisome wateriness. Perhaps it was his
whiney voice, his unrelenting
unpersuasiveness.
According to the BBC, Starmer could be
so caught up in his briefs that he was
oblivious to what was going on around
him. His friend the late BBC journalist Paul
Vickers shared the washing-machine flat
with him and recalls: “There was one
occasion when I’d finished work, came
back to the house and there were two
burglars looking down the stairs carrying
our television and the video recorder, and
I said I live here. They threw the telly and
the video recorder at me and ran o”.
Sources told Village that Starmer had
bored them out of the house, putting it to
them that they did not have a five-point
plan, but Vickers remembers it dierently:
“I went into the house and there was Keir
and he was sitting at his desk working. He
was so buried in his text that he didn’t
notice two burglars walking around the
house helping themselves to our stu”.
He’s not just uncharismatic, he’s also
stiff. Awkward. His biographer, Tom
Baldwin, wrote in The Guardian:
“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
dicult 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 dicult for others around
him because there really aren’t many
people made of that kind of stu”.
The stuff drove him to becoming a
founder member of progressive ‘Doughty
Street’ chambers in 1990 and he
was
anointed a Queen’s Counsel (QC)in 2002
and ‘QC of the year in Human Rights and
74 July-August 2024
Starmer made it central that he was ready
to break with the key promises he made
to win the leadership, if he felt they were
standing in the way of election victory
The six “first steps” are
1. Sticking to tough spending rules
in order to deliver economic
stability
2. Setting up Great British Energy,
a publicly owned clean power
energy company
3. Cutting NHS waiting lists by
providing 40,000 more
appointments each week -
funded by tackling tax
avoidance and non-dom
loopholes.
4. Launching a border security
command to stop the gangs
arranging small boat crossings
5. Providing more neighbourhood
police ocers to reduce
antisocial behaviour and
introduced new penalties for
oenders
6. Recruiting 6,500 teachers, paid
for through ending tax breaks
for private schools.
Sir Keir sid he ws friend of Jeremy but
then tht they hd never been friends
Public Law’ in 2007.
As a “leftwing lawyer” and “principled
opponent of state power”, he was not an
“obvious choice” to lead the Crown
Prosecution Service (CPS) as DPP from
2008 and this was “borne out by some of
his decisions”, according to David Renton,
a fellow barrister, writing in The Guardian
in 2020. Starmer approved prosecutions
of parliamentarians for fiddling their
expenses. He also helped to bring two
men accused of murdering 18-year-old
Stephen Lawrence to justice. Boris Johnson
disgracefully dredged up an old claim that
he “failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile”, the
serial paedophile. He did not prosecute
anyone over the death in 2005 of Jean
Charles de Menezes, shot by police who
mistook him for a suicide bomber, but his
decision was upheld by the European
Court of Human Rights. He defended the
Human Rights Act against Tory proposals
to repeal it He was knighted when he left
the post. He likes being a knight. He is
married to NHS occupational therapist
Victoria Alexander.
His preferred way of letting o steam
has always been football, or so he says.
He still organises the five-a-side and
inevitably has a season ticket at Highbury.
Village could imagine that watching old
episodes of the Antiques Roadshow and
studying the water level in the reservoir
might be his real secret pleasures.
Elected to the House of Commons as
recently as the 2015 general election,
Starmer was appointed Shadow Minister
for Immigration by new party leader Jeremy
Corbyn that September. He resigned the
following year with twenty other members
of the shadow cabinet in protest at
Corbyn’s leadership, but accepted a new
post under Corbyn later that year as
shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the
European Union. Although Starmer was a
rookie, he stood out because he’d already
done a big public job and even had a
knighthood which everyone liked. His
fellow backbencher Carolyn Harris says
she could tell he was going places so when
she met him for the first time she said “ohh
I’m going to make you the next leader of
the Labour Party”. Ever the virile cock,
Starmer said “OK should we have a cup of
tea”. Harris not surprisingly saw
“somebody who was little bit wiser than
the rest of us, grown up if you like”.
As shadow Brexit Secretary until he
became leader, Starmer was the key figure
in steering the party to its 2019 election
stance of backing a second referendum.
His attitude to the EU is founded on
deeply internationalist instincts. He has
spoken of taking inspiration from the post-
World War II recovery, and of how avoiding
such a conflict for the sake of his children
— he has a son,
16 and a daughter, 13
(dicult ages: it’s his biggest concern
about the premiership)— is a guiding
principle of his politics.
In April 2020 Starmer won the race to
replace Jeremy Corbyn in the first round
with 56.2 percent of the vote, beating
rivals Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa
Nandy.
Starmer has insisted there is no case for
rejoining the European Union, though he
has said his party does not want to
“diverge” from the bloc’s regulations.
Starmer said the UK would not be “a
rule-taker” under a Labour government.
But he said this did not mean there
would be lower standards on food and
workers’ rights.”We don’t want to diverge,
we don’t want to lower standards, we don’t
want to rip up environmental standards,
working standards for people at work, food
standards and all the rest of it”. Former
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said it
showed the Labour leader “wants to rejoin
the EU in all but name”. Bulldog Levelling
Up Secretary Michael Gove said they
revealed “the real Keir Starmer” and that
he wanted to “re-run the Brexit agonies of
the past”. Sadly no. The Financial Times is
fairer: “There are still important gaps in
the likely prospectus. Although there has
been a shift in public opinion against
Brexit, Starmer has so far only set out
limited plans for forging a closer
relationship with the EU”
On Gaza, Starmer’s comments during a
televised interview, in which he appeared
to approve the Israeli government’s cutting
o of its water and power, have led a large
number of Muslim voters and students,
who care about human rights and the
Palestinian struggle for liberation, to move
away from the Labour party.
On deportations to Rwanda, Starmer
argues that scrapping the scheme would
free up £75m in the first year of a Labour
government to hire hundreds of extra
investigators and “intelligence agents”.
On Northern Ireland, Starmer says a
referendum on unification is “not even on
the horizon”. He has long said he would
campaign for Northern Ireland to remain
part of the UK if such a referendum was
called and he has ruled out holding a poll
if he becomes prime minister.Those
July-August 2024 75
remarks were criticised by his predecessor
Jeremy Corbyn. His chief of sta, Sue Gray
once said her role was “to ensure and
maintain the Union” and has reputed
strong links to UK intelligence services.
Several of Starmer’s key advisors have
Irish links. Gray’s son, Liam Conlon, has
been selected as Labour candidate for
Beckenham and Pinge, and is chair of
Labour’s Irish Society. And Morgan
McSweeney from outside Macroom is
Starmer’s dutiful ‘Campaign Director’.
According to the Irish Times: “A veteran
party figure said it was the Corkman’s idea
for Starmer to campaign for the top job on
a left-leaning platform that mollified
Corbynites, only for the new leader to ditch
it all and pivot to the right once he got the
job”. Others told Village it was such a
central strategy of course it derived from
a range of Starmer’s henchpeople but
primarily from the leader himself. It is not
clear if McSweeney’s future is as advisor
to government or rather whether he will be
pivoted to the Labour Party.
Starmer made it central that he was
ready to break with the key promises he
made to win the leadership, if he felt they
were standing in the way of election
victory.
“I didn’t come into politics to vote, over
and over again in Parliament and lose, and
then tweet about it. I came into politics, to
go into government to change millions of
lives for the better”.
A 2022 biography by Oliver Eagleton,
’The Starmer Project’, turns the political
naïf into a “bequied Machiavelli”.
According to the Economist magazine, in
May: “The Labour leader is better than he
was at campaigning but that is not saying
a lot”. Starmer, once the rising star of the
human-rights bar, loathes Prime Minister’s
Questions, the veneration of oratory over
delivery.
Of course much of Labour’s manifesto,
launched on 9 June, is gu slagging the
despicable Tories, (“We can stop the
chaos, turn the page, and start to rebuild
our country”. and endless chatter about
change. But we won’t let that detain us.
Technically, Starmer is:
“Better understood as a bureaucrat
who found he could be more influential
fixing institutions from the inside.
Earlier in his career he served as an
adviser to Northern Ireland’s police
force and then as the reformist head
of the Crown Prosecution Service. The
Labour Party, which he took charge of
in 2020, was the most chaotic of all”.
His speeches “bracket him with other
centre-left leaders who are seeking to
revive the idea of “active” government in
response to climate change and the plight
of post-industrial towns”.
The Economist lays out his analysis
which is that:
“There are two distinguishing
elements. The first is an administrative
critique: more than being too large or
too small, the British state is simply
ineective. The answer is to align all
government activity around five
‘missions’, to be pursued over two
terms of a Labour government.
‘Starmerism’ is as much about the
‘how’ as the ‘what’, says Sir Keir”.
The state is “ineective, he argues,
because it is both over-centralised in
Whitehall and siloed between
government departments. Worse still
is a culture of short-termism and
meagre ambition”.
More importantly, his policy is laid
out in:
“‘Missions’ — covering growth, the
National Health Service,
decarbonisation, crime and education
— which will come with single
audacious targets, such as halving
serious violent crime and achieving
the fastest sustained growth in the
G7”.
Strategically, they will serve to triage all
other policies. “‘Are we going to do a or b?’
says Starmer. ‘If the answer is it helps with
that mission, then the answer is “yes”. If
the answer is it doesn’t, then the answer’s
“no”’”. Dull, non-ideological stu this how
not what.
The second strand of Starmerism is an
embrace of “modern supply-side
economics”. Social democracy cannot be
done on a shoestring. Britain’s sluggish
economy is undermining the welfare state
which Labour prides itself on having built.
The Labour leader’s answer is to focus on
expanding the productive capacity of the
economy—by streamlining the planning
regime, by improving labour-market
participation, by softening the impact of
Brexit and so on.
One goal predominates. “Economic
growth is the absolute foundational stone
for everything”. If you think making
economic growth your lodestar is a
mistake you will look elsewhere than
Starmer’s Labour Party. Its manifesto
explains: “Labour’s manifesto for change
is a plan to kickstart economic growth by
reforming Britain’s economy and bring
about a decade of renewal”.
But missions and even manifestos aren’t
enough for Sir Starmer, he must also have
pledges and steps. The party had a “big,
bold plan” but “we need first steps”, he
arms. The manifesto duly states that,
“Labour’s first steps for change show how
we will begin to achieve those missions,
with plans to deliver economic stability,
cut NHS waiting times, launch a new
Border Security Command, set up Great
British Energy, crackdown on antisocial
behaviour and recruit 6,500 new teachers”.
He dumped free tuition for third-level
students which is now neither a mission
nor a pledge, let alone a step. He is also
no longer pledging energy nationalisation
or, since he has suggested he may drop
Labour’s key 2030 net zero climate target,
to “put the Green New Deal at the heart of
everything we do”, .
Ocial manifesto pledges are “not to
raise rates of income tax, national
insurance or VAT”.
Underpinning, or perhaps post-pinning
all this, according to the Financial Times:
“A blizzard of other policies are now being
rolled out, as Starmer scents power: an
overhaul of Britain’s stifling planning
rules; a rewrite of swaths of employment
law; some targeted higher taxes on the
wealthy; and constitutional reforms
including scrapping the House of Lords”.
“At times”, according to the Financial
TImes, “he has chosen to deliver socially
conservative messages on issues like
defence, law and order, and patriotism
while standing in front of a Union
Jack.Allies say this has helped create the
political space to be bolder on economic
policy”.
Alastair Campbell, who was
communications chief to former prime
minister Tony Blair, says Starmer has
successfully carried out the first two parts
of a three-stage process; dissociating from
his predecessor and proving the
Conservatives are “not fit for the job”.
Now, says Campbell, “he needs to answer
the question of what Labour would do
dierently”.
As of 16 June, with three weeks to go,
Labour and the Tories were on course for
their lowest combined vote share since the
second world war.
With all the parties having now unveiled
their election manifestos, Labour has
maintained a dominant 17-point lead. You
do not get to cultivate a politics as
dysfunctional as Britain’s in the 2020s and
pull a heroic leader out at any general
election. Post-Brexit Britain has the politics
it deserves and the choice is between two
flimsy lightweights and a charismatic
lightweight. Sunak and Farage are
bondmarket lightweights with poll ratings
of around minus 40; Starmer is a human-
rights-lawyer lightweight with a hardly
Churchillian pollrating of minus 3. Landslide
delivery from 14 years of Tories is finally at
hand. For the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer
is the Knight-in-Shining-Armour of not-that-
popular lightweights.
