Starmer’s biographer: “Why Keir’s weaknesses are his strengths”

LONDON – Tom Baldwin is so keen to speak that his bacon sandwich is still half untouched after more than one hour of conversation. We meet the British journalist, author, former senior political adviser to Ed Miliband and director of communications & strategy at the Labour Party in a club in central London, where Baldwin had breakfast with us this week.

Baldwin is the right man to answer a straightforward question: “Who is Sir Keir Starmer?”, the man poised to be the very likely new British Prime Minister by the end of the year after entering politics only eight years ago at 52. The leader of the Labour Party is quite a private man; sometimes, he even looks elusive, although self-confident. Also, his political moves are always highly cautious. This strategy has turned out to be the right one so far, also thanks to the ongoing self-destruction of the ruling Tory Party. But the question remains: who is Keir Starmer?

Baldwin, who seems proud of his “Keir Starmer: The Biography” (William Collins), tries to answer: “This is an unusual book in British politics. You don’t normally get this degree of access to a political leader in the run-up to a general election, particularly when that political leader is so cautious, and the campaign around him is probably even more cautious. You’ve heard this sort of cliche of what Roy Jenkins said to Tony Blair before the 1997 election, “like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”… And so they are very, very nervous about this book.”

Right, the plot thickens. Baldwin stresses more than once the fact that he is not Keir Starmer’s spokesperson. “Yes, I am a Labour party person. I like Keir Starmer; I’ve got to know him. But I’ve tried to maintain some objectivity, which is not always easy. I am pretty certain that he won’t like every word I’ve written. Partly because he is such a private and cautious man.”

So why did Keir Starmer accept to co-operate in his biography? “Initially, it was going to be an autobiography, and I was brought in to help him”, Baldwin tells “La Repubblica” and a few other foreign correspondents based in London during this breakfast, “and the logic of that autobiography was that at the time he was 20 points behind Boris Johnson in the polls, and no one thought he had a chance of beating him, a more charismatic opponent. There was a sense among his team that he needed to get out and tell his story or do something to change the picture.”

Then everything politically changed, and the autobiography became a biography: “This means that the book is slightly unusual in that I got a lot of records on interiority from him in a way that you don’t normally use a biography. There’s quite a lot of inside his head”.

Baldwin gives some more insight about the genesis of his book and the reaction of Keir Starmer to it: “It became pretty clear within a few weeks of working with him on the autobiography that he felt very uncomfortable about it. He is who he is. He doesn’t like talking about himself all the time. He actually said, you know, “I’m worried it’s gonna make me look like a wanker””. This is because “he wants to do things rather than make it all about himself. I think he is really driven by the sense of duty rather than the idea of being on a stage and having cheering crowds in front of him. He feels uncomfortable with that.”

Baldwin thinks his childhood profoundly impacted the Keir Starmer we know: “It was traumatic. His childhood is very stiff; he has a brittle relationship with his father. He has a very emotionally intense relationship with his mother. Then, his three siblings: none of whom went to grammar school, none of whom went to university. All left behind. That’s a big part of his makeup. And when he talks about breaking these glass ceilings, he’s thinking about that.”

After that, Starmer leaves home and goes to university; here comes another set of influences on him, according to Baldwin, “which roughly characterise with the three F’s: Friends, Football and Family”.

Soon, football becomes everything for Starmer. According to Baldwin, the Labour leader always draws parallels between politics and his favourite sport and his team, Arsenal: “When he threw Jeremy Corbyn out of the party, he compared that to [Arsenal’s coach] Arteta getting rid of Aubameyang”, a former striker for the Gunners.

Baldwin goes on: Starmer “is quite obsessive. It’s abnormal how much he loves football. He puts things into his football frame. When he was at school, his dad wouldn’t let him watch TV because her dad was quite weird”, and he “couldn’t join conversations” about Starsky and Hutch with friends. So, a young Keir thought, “Let’s play football”: He has always used football as a sort of way of making himself”.

Because of his passion for football, Baldwin thinks that Starmer is a very traditional English man. But that’s not the only reason: “His friendships are extraordinarily long-lasting and intense. He said he’d rather go to the pub with this friend of mine, Colin Peacock, than anyone any political event”.

“Then Starmer’s third big influence is his legal career, even on his voice”, Baldwin notes: ”It’s very neutral voice. You don’t want to make a mistake, and it’s quite hard to unlearn that after being a lawyer. So when people talk about why Starmer seems rather stiff as a politician, I think it’s that legal background, which has also influenced his preference for fact-based arguments”.

That’s also why Starmer is an “untypical politician, who he’s actually been more successful than many others. He’s not bound to a particular ideology or faction”, Baldwin underlines, “but he’s been able to move very fast. That’s how he has changed the Labour Party, without some great drum roll and fireworks. For instance, after being elected leader of the Labour Party, he didn’t say, “I’m going to fire up my predecessor and completely turn it inside out”. He slowly directed a series of almost judicial judgments that reached a position where Jeremy Corbyn could no longer be Labour MP. Starmer is moving one building block around and putting another on another, and no one will watch that. It’s boring. But by the end of it, you might find he has built a house”.

By the way, talking about Jeremy Corbyn. Today, Keir Starmer is a champion against antisemitism. However, one of his biggest contradictions is that the Labour leader served for many months as Shadow Brexit Secretary under Corbyn before succeeding him and kicking his predecessor out of the party. Here comes Baldwin’s explanation: “Starmer resigned from the front bench in 2016 along with many other people. Then he was invited to be Shadow Brexit Secretary. All the people from Wes Streeting onwards who didn’t serve on Jeremy Corbyn were privately urging Kier Starmer to stay in the Shadow Cabinet because Brexit was such an important issue. However, he did raise his issues publicly three or four times. He also raised it continually in private. He was pushing against it very hard behind the scenes. What purpose would have been served by resigning and being replaced by someone else? He says he thought about resigning quite often, particularly after going to the synagogue – his wife is Jewish. Those were very uncomfortable moments for him. He was furious about a few things included in the BBC Panorama documentary. He didn’t resign because you’re bound by collective responsibility. It’s also a lawyer thing again. Former Justice Secretary Charlie Falconer once said: ‘If you’re a lawyer, you can’t say my client is a complete fuckwit. You’re trying to win your case. You might think your client is a complete fuckwit but you don’t say so publicly”. I think his relationship with Corbyn was not dissimilar to representing a rather difficult client”.

Of course, “this guy”, namely Keir Starmer, “is not perfect”, Baldwin warns. “He lacks many political skills which might be necessary for what he wants to do. He doesn’t do the performative side of politics. The challenges facing him are enormous. His deputy Angela Rayner said, ‘He’s the least political person I know in politics and easily in the Labour Party’. That’s both a strength and a weakness”, Baldwin points out, “the same characteristics which mean that he’s not a very good politician actually make him a potentially very effective Prime Minister, because he won’t be bound to a particular faction; he won’t be bound to a particular ideology, he is not going to be polarising this country. Actually, he is going to seek to bring people together.”

Stunningly, Baldwin argues that Keir Starmer “doesn’t like politics”. In fact, the Labour Leader reportedly once said, “I fucking hate this job”, if it is from the opposition benches. Think about “his reaction to the Hartlepool by-election, when he lost in 2021. The immediate instinct of any political leader would be: “How do I cling on?”. Instead he kept saying: “I’m not making a big difference, There’s no point of being around it”. It took a day to persuade them to not to resign. He didn’t make a statement that day until 4 pm. This is very unpolitical. I don’t think he’s always enjoyed being leader of the Labour. He said repeatedly: “I fucking hate this job”, because he’s in the opposition. He can’t do something. His motivation is to do something rather than be someone”.

So the question is: why did Keir Starmer enter politics? Baldwin sketches the trajectory of the Labour leader: “He has an account in the book of slowly going from someone who works “on the outside” as human rights lawyer trying to win things case by case, to then trying to win these more strategic cases, to then when working in the Northern Ireland peace process, as a human rights adviser, realising that working on the inside he can bring more change. Then he goes further on the inside to become a chief prosecutor and see how you can actually bring real change to the legal system through that”. At the end of the day, Starmer realises that to make things change “he’s got to be as much as possible inside the system. That’s why he got selected as a Labour candidate in 2015, but not with an ambition to be leader.”

Another intriguing question about Starmer: after Brexit, he has insisted that the UK will not rejoin the Single Market or the EU Customs Union. So what does Starmer mean when he promises “a closer relationship with the EU” once in power? Baldwin’s response is: “What he means is: you’re going to be faced by incremental decisions. I don’t see a huge appetite in Europe for Britain to reenter the Single Market. But there is much low-hanging fruit about where we have a closer trading relationship. Labour can make those decisions in a way that a Tory government can’t. The Tory Party is absolutely governed by a hard-right ideology, a Brexit-driven ideology, and some Trumpianism: it cannot make rational decisions. So, if a closer alignment with Europe is in Britain’s national interest, Starmer will choose a closer alignment, while a Tory Party won’t. Now, where does that end up? I don’t know with his incrementalism. But there’ll be some big decision”.

Maybe on security, for instance? “That’s the key. Now, we think the whole debate is about the Single Market. But Starmer is advocating this EU security pact. Britain is possibly the biggest player in terms of European Defence. If Trump turns his back on Ukraine, frankly, the EU security pact and what Labour has to say about that will matter much more than the Single Market. His instincts are for a closer alignment, but without some big-bang, magic-bullet solution. He doesn’t want a big debate on whether Britain should rejoin the Single Market or the EU. That would take all the energy of the next Parliament. But he is very clear. We need EU security back to us, and we need to support Ukraine. He is thinking very hard already about what that means”.

And what about any appetite for a sort of Customs Union with the EU? Baldwin adds up: “Look at what he [Starmer] was doing as Shadow Brexit Secretary in the EU until my campaign eventually got him to sign up to a second referendum. He was working on plans for a Customs Union. He went to Switzerland; he went to Norway. He looked at their systems; he spoke a lot with Barnier, and he thought there was a potential to get something similar to the Customs Union (CU). But not the CU, something a little bit more bespoke. And he still thinks that some of that is possible, but I don’t want to set some hare running that “He’s got a secret plan to enter a CU”. Everything he does is iterative and incremental. But I think his record of getting some deal around a Customs Union is worth revisiting if you want to look at where he might take a Labour government.”

A Labour spokesman, contacted by La Repubblica, disputes this view: “Unlike this Tory shower, the next Labour government will make Brexit work. As we have said for a long time, this does not involve rejoining the Single Market, the Customs Union, any form of associate membership or going backwards in any way. Keir’s Labour will give Britain its future back”.

Shortly after, Baldwin gets in touch again: “I was clearly trying to steer you away from the idea of rejoining Single Market (SM) or the Customs Union (CU) by saying the change would be incremental – piecemeal. Obviously, the plan he was putting together for “a” not “the” Customs Union back in 17/18 is worth revisiting as journalists looking for evidence of what he wanted to do at the time and – speculatively – where he might eventually end up, but I hope I made clear there is no secret plan for anything like this right now. It would be very misleading to suggest there is now”. After a few hours, Baldwin sends me another email: “All I’m trying to do is make clear that there’s no plan for CU/SM” and that “there is no plan or intention to join the CU or ‘a’ CU.”

Some say that a Labour government may soon implode after the election, given the great divisions in the party about Gaza and other issues. Baldwin disagrees with this scenario: “Starmer would say the opposite. He says that every day in opposition is agony, like being in a prison cell marks the days until you get out and do something. The same people who say he won’t be able to achieve anything in government are the same people who, in 2020, said he had no chance of winning the next general election. They have underestimated him once. It might be a mistake to underestimate him a second time.”