How much do we actually know about the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer?

This year, we are likely to see books and documentaries about him. How much will we find out? Whereas Conservatives Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were filleted by the media, will this be the case with Starmer?

Paucity of information

Last Friday, I wrote about Labour and Lib Dem politicians involved with the Post Office Horizon scandal. Starmer appeared as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a position he held between 2008 and 2013, during the latter Labour years of government into the Coalition (Conservative/Lib Dem) years. In my post, I mentioned that on January 11, The Telegraph reported that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecuted more subpostmasters than previously thought. Yet, Sir Keir maintains that none of the cases ever arrived on his desk during his tenure. In a brief discussion with the press, he maintained that he had no awareness of any of these cases.

Interesting.

You can imagine if a Conservative Party leader were in the same situation and said the same thing, the media would have hounded him for more information.

As far as policies are concerned, Starmer has become known on Conservative benches as Mr Flip-Flop for adopting one policy and ditching it days later. This has happened time and time again.

I had an interesting exchange in the comments section with one of my regular readers, dearieme, who pointed out that something odd has happened to the Sir Jimmy Savile files. Those supposedly crossed Starmer’s desk during his time as DPP. Nothing happened to Savile before or after his death.

Savile’s case, which has interested many Britons who remember him presenting BBC favourites such as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, for the allegations that he pursued teens for his own pleasure. Top of the Pops offered a perfect hunting ground, particularly backstage.

Dearieme commented (emphases mine):

But who is in charge of deciding what should reach the desk of the DPP but the DPP himself?

Consider too: “Mr Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when the decision not to prosecute Savile was made on the grounds of “insufficient evidence”. The allegations against Savile were dealt with by local police and a reviewing lawyer for the CPS.

… the CPS said that records relating to the decision not to charge Savile were not kept, which the service said is in line with its data retention policy.”

And who is responsible for the CPS’s data retention policy? The DPP, surely?

He doesn’t seem much to like the idea that “the buck stops here”.

Again, if that were a Conservative, the story would recur time and time again.

‘Son of a toolmaker’

I started digging around Starmer’s past for another reason. He continually refers to himself as the ‘son of a toolmaker’, yet his father was a self-employed toolmaker.

I found a fascinating article on Paul Knaggs’s Labour Heartlands, ‘Keir Starmer: “My Dad Was A Toolmaker” And Other Little Grifts’.

This is what he has to say about ‘son of a toolmaker’:

To court working class voters, Starmer touts his background as the son of a factory floor toolmaker. But peek behind the veil and cracks emerge in this narrative. Turns out his father owned an independent toolmaking firm, devoid of managers lording over factory workers. Already Starmer’s tale feels more scripted than authentic.

One might be tempted to let it slide if it weren’t for the fact that Starmer leans so heavily on this fabricated image. Moreover, it is rather insulting to suggest that a toolmaker would be looked down upon, which Starmer does…

During his speech at the TUC, Keir Starmer recounted an anecdote about his father, a skilled toolmaker who allegedly felt looked down upon for working on the factory floor.

During a speech at the TUC, Starmer claimed:

“Despite being a skilled toolmaker throughout his working life, my dad thought people looked down on him because he worked on the factory floor. He was right about that.”

His vivid anecdote about others scorning his dad for manual labour exposes Starmer’s upper middle class disconnect. In all blue collar communities, skilled tradespeople enjoy tremendous respect, their expertise honed over years. Starmer betrays ignorance by implying contempt for the dignity of craft and graft.

It exposes a revealing slip that sheds light on Starmer’s true background, contrasting with the official version he peddles.

At that moment, an instinctual feeling arises, suggesting something amiss, a lack of authenticity in Starmer’s words.

Starmer’s father, in reality, operated the Oxted Tool Co. His own independent toolmaking enterprise until the 1990s. By all accounts, he was a proficient self-employed tradesman, devoid of superiors or overseers, operating from a rented workshop on an industrial estate rather than a conventional factory setting.

In an ideal political landscape focused on substantive policies rather than theatrical portrayals of “the worker,” the specifics of Starmer’s father’s profession should hold little relevance. Alas, the current state of affairs has brought us to a point where such details seem to take centre stage, overshadowing more crucial matters.

It turns out that Keir worked for his father for a short time:

While Starmer has made frequent references to his toolmaker father, Dad Rodney once boasted that he ran his own factory. Reflecting on his son’s knighthood in 2014, Rodney Starmer wrote in Oxted’s theatre newsletter that his son had spent six months before university working ‘in my factory operating a production machine’.

That sort of gives the game away.

None of this would matter in any way, of course, but for the fact that Keir Starmer has not been totally explicit about it when asked.

Dearieme left a comment on this:

My father’s company had several dozen employees: he didn’t incorporate it until late in life i.e. for nearly all his time it wasn’t a “Ltd”.

So I see no reason to suppose, on the evidence presented, that Pa Starmer’s company was tiny e.g. just the boss and a boy.

Is Starmer ashamed of not being proletarian or ashamed of being only petit bourgeois?

Why not say proudly “Dad got his instrument maker’s ticket and went on to found and run his own small instrument-making company”?

Good for Dad; boo for “Sir” Kneel.

Shades of Obama

There is something about this media narrative that has sent my spidey-senses tingling, to borrow an American expression.

A few months ago, it seemed as if the media are trying to craft another Obama, this time for Britain.

Paul Knaggs senses it, too:

Grifters come in various guises. The archetypal grifter is the smooth-talking con artist accumulating riches through scams and deception. But the political grifter also flourishes – cunning operators leveraging positions of public trust for entry into elite circles of influence and affluence.

Rather than pickpocket the vulnerable, these grifters target the body politic itself. They sing seductive songs of change to gain power, later shedding populist skins when opportunity beckons …

Followers of Noam Chomsky will recall how he spotlighted Obama’s grift in real-time during his presidency. Obama swept into office on a wave of populist rage after the 2007/2008 financial crisis. His platitudes promised hope and change for an angry public stripped of economic security.

Yet Chomsky called out Obama as an establishment Trojan Horse from day one. His meteoric rise and messiah-like image aroused suspicion. Lo and behold, Obama’s tenure protected status quo interests. His administration engineered the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history – redistributing billions from public hands into the pockets of private banks and financial institutions.

Obama won accolades for “stabilizing markets,” while ordinary citizens faced job losses, austerity cutbacks, and Predatory crisis exploitation. Chomsky points out the cynical ploy of offering false prophets to absorb revolutionary steam when public anger threatens prevailing power structures.

Obama’s primary function was quelling class tensions through his cult of personality. He achieved record banker bailouts while placating calls for pitchforks. The masses gratefully accepted meagre crumbs while financiers feasted, saved from accountability by their political guardian angel. In Chomsky’s eyes, Obama was a manufactured release valve to ease pressure for root and branch reform after the economy exposed its glaring cruelties.

We have something similar with the media narrative surrounding Starmer, with no questions asked. Starmer is allowed to flip flop weekly without criticism, and no one delves into his career achievements or otherwise, particularly as DPP. Jimmy Savile? Get over it!

Knaggs says:

What receives less scrutiny is the meticulous orchestration surrounding Corbyn’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer. The establishment press provides fawning coverage, granting their darling levels of puffery beyond even Boris Johnson’s cult of personality. Starmer has become the system’s Manchurian candidate …

Starmer increasingly resembles a David Cameron tribute act, devoid of conviction politics or concrete vision. His new working class posturing follows years of loyalty serving institutional powers deeply invested in preventing fundamental change.

For an establishment desperate to regain tight control, Starmer offers familiar and reassuring stewardship. But his links and records invite scepticism from those seeking transformative left agendas …

When examining Starmer’s personal history, a stark disparity emerges between truth and reality. It feels off-sync, contrived, resembling the plot of the Manchurian Candidate. One must question the extent to which the establishment is determined to prop him up.

Why, indeed, does a mediocre politician like Starmer, whose stagecraft resembles that of a man impersonating Rumpole of the Bailey, garner unwavering support from the establishment? And why is the media so firmly in his corner? Each time he delivers a major speech, we are left questioning the authenticity of his words, as they resemble nothing more than empty closing statements devoid of genuine conviction. After all, his promises and pledges hold as much substance as a bucket riddled with holes, then again, why should he even believe what he says? As things are going he will see office not on merit but simply because the Tories are so bad we have no other choice.

Beyond these dubious background claims swirl deeper queries. Why does such a mediocre politician gain backing from every pillar of the establishment?

Prefers Davos to Parliament

I was shocked when Starmer said in an interview in January 2023 that he would rather be part of Davos than the Mother of All Parliaments. How could he?

He told former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis:

Westminster is too constrained… Once you get out of Westminster, whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.

Knaggs tells us:

Perhaps answers lie in Starmer’s membership of the elitist Trilateral Commission, rubbing shoulders with the world’s wealthiest figures. Their agenda is preserving commerce unhindered by civil rights meddling from unions or protesters. Starmer appears a willing custodian of vested interests rather than an advocate for working people.

Not ‘a man of the people’

Michael Ashcroft wrote a biography of Starmer, Red Knight. Knaggs excerpts parts that examine the man behind the mask:

‘One of Keir’s faults, which has come out from time to time, is his wanting to insist how working class he is when he’s absolutely, plainly not,’ says Professor Bill Bowring, who teaches law at Birkbeck College, University of London.

‘If you’re a QC and former Director of Public Prosecutions, you’ve left your working-class roots far behind. That’s a weakness of his, to go on about it. He’s become very middle class.’

Ashcroft says:

Sir Keir did not want this story to be written. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he actively obstructed it …

By having such a prickly reaction to my decision to write his story, Sir Keir has arguably shown more of himself than he perhaps realised.

Given that most of his career has been spent outside elected politics – he was a barrister from 1987 until 2008; the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 2008 to 2013; and only became a Labour parliamentary candidate in December 2014 – some probing is justified. So who is the man who would be Britain’s leader?

Starmer’s education was thoroughly middle-middle class, which has its own privileges. Parents can afford to pay for them, musical instruments being one such luxury:

In 1974, Keir won a place at Reigate Grammar School, which would become independent during his time there. Those who were already pupils were allowed to continue, with their fees paid by the local council.

Starmer’s friends there included Quentin Cook, subsequently known as Norman and by his DJ name Fatboy Slim. They took violin lessons together, though Cook left Reigate Grammar aged 16.

Music remained a very important part of the life of Starmer, who also played the flute, piano and recorder. He was a good enough flute player to secure a place at the prestigious Junior Guildhall School of Music.

Every Saturday morning, at the insistence of his parents, he would travel to London for lessons by staff who played in professional orchestras.

It is noteworthy that when the Daily Mail discovered in September 2009 that Starmer had omitted to mention Reigate Grammar School in his Who’s Who entry, it concluded that this was a piece of chicanery which reflected badly on his character. By then, he was the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Apparently, at university, he was known as the King of the Middle Class Radicals.

Years later, he mixed with a notable bunch of lawyers:

In March 2002, Starmer became a QC at the relatively early age of 39. A few months later he was mentioned in an Observer profile piece headlined The New Legal Crusaders, which focused on a group of ambitious young lawyers.

This article is noteworthy for the following sentence: ‘Among them was Ben Emmerson, the dashing young advocate and colleague of Cherie Booth at the fashionable Matrix Chambers …’

Starmer finds fault with his patriarchal home life as a youngster, because his father Rodney wasn’t emotionally open. Yet Rodney was intensely proud of his son:

Keir Starmer is often described as being intensely ambitious, yet it is arguable that this trait is at least in part a consequence of the hopes and dreams of his family.

The evidence for this comes from a round-robin letter written in December 2014 by Starmer’s father, Rodney. In it, he expressed to friends his delight that his son had just been chosen as Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate in the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras.

‘We are very pleased and wish him well,’ Rodney wrote. ‘My dad, Bert, said many years ago that one of the Starmer’s should be an MP.’

Who can say why Starmer’s mechanic grandfather seemed fixed upon a family member making it to the House of Commons? But Keir will no doubt have known about this comment.

It was a huge personal tragedy for Starmer that his mother did not live to see him become an MP in the General Election of May 2015. Very sadly, she died less than two weeks before polling day.

Unexpressive fathers are a generational thing. I had one myself, and I couldn’t always get the measure of the man. However, just a few weeks before he died, he sent me a long, handwritten letter telling me how much he loved me.

I would say that Rodney had plenty of love for Keir if he took all manner of music lessons and went to law school.

Letting a flattering rumour live for ten years

Between 2002 and 2012, Starmer never denied a well-circulated media rumour that he was the inspiration for Helen Fielding’s Mark Darcy, the dashing lawyer in the Bridget Jones series.

It appears that the aforementioned 2002 Observer article kicked things off:

What appears to have happened is that in April 2012, a decade after the Observer article, a Sunday Times journalist interviewed Starmer.

‘Just before my interview with Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), someone tells me that the chisel-jawed former human rights lawyer was the inspiration for Mark Darcy,’ she wrote at the time.

‘I am not sure if this is true.’ From that point on, other journalists decided that it was true and the myth held. Starmer never denied it, no doubt relishing the touch of glamour it gave him.

For example, during the Labour leadership contest, when ITV News asked him if the Darcy character was based on him, he answered: ‘Everybody asks me this question when they should be asking [Fielding] the question because she knows the answer and I don’t.’

Finally, it was Fielding herself who explained on Desert Island Discs last July that Starmer played no part in her thinking up Mark Darcy.

While this may seem to be a trivial matter, one friend of Starmer says it is rather revealing.

The Starmer whom this person knows apparently paid attention when members of the opposite sex said he was good-looking.

‘What’s interesting is he knows full well he wasn’t the model for Mark Darcy,’ says the friend. ‘His answers tended to leave the impression that it was true.’

Policies

The big question is, ‘What sort of policies can we expect from Keir Starmer should he become Prime Minister?’

A February 16 article in The Daily Sceptic warns, ‘Keir Starmer’s Coming Revolution Is More Radical Than His Opponents Realise’:

… If it could only be definitively shown that Starmer is simply a politician like the rest, then his public brand would fall away …

Those who invoke it live in hope that if Starmer is merely grasping and cynical, then he can be assimilated; he can be dealt with. This steady rubbing off of the varnish relies, above all, on the assumption that there is in fact something basically familiar underneath.

But there isn’t. This is the great trick that has been missed about Britain’s likely next Prime Minister. The stately manner is not a conceit to be rubbed away, but is an irreducible part of Keir Starmer’s whole idea of life and politics. Starmer simply isn’t someone that can be digested into the ordinary rigmarole of Westminster, however much his opponents might wish it.

Starmer is used to being in charge by applying the law to great effect:

Run the gamut of Keir Starmer’s career and you’ll find a man who has traded not in deals, appeals and backroom manoeuvre – but in moral black-and-white, in iron legalisms and in hard executive power. Starmer’s time at the bar was spent entirely within the domain of human rights law; that is to say, the enforcement of the particular moral dogmas established in 1997 against secular and democratic authority. As Director of Public Prosecutions – an office that is beginning to resemble a kind of parallel Home Secretary – Starmer had broad personal discretion over how the laws of England were enforced, and against whom. This basic tenor held in Westminster, too. Starmer’s only role in ordinary retail politics was Shadow Immigration Minister, which he soon left. His tenure as Shadow Brexit Secretary – his biggest job in Westminster before winning the Labour leadership – was legalistic rather than political: it was Keir Starmer, more than anyone else, who pioneered the idea that Brexit was not even wrong, but simply “unlawful“. His defeat of the Corbynites was similarly litigious; it did not rely so much on any avowed criticism of their ideas (he endorsed most of them during the leadership campaign), but a simple recourse to the party rulebook to purge their ranks.

Everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project – the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 – can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it …

What does Starmerism mean? It is a policy of enforcement. It is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo. It’s no surprise, then, that the cause has taken for its instruments two figures from outside electoral politics: Keir Starmer and Sue Gray. It is, further, no surprise that both of these individuals had a spell in Northern Ireland (the latter, most likely, as some sort of police spy), which, through the Good Friday Agreement, was an early testing ground for the methods of ‘stakeholder’ governance. Under Starmerism, the rule of the judge, of the quango and of the bureaucrat – long implicit – will at last declare itself openly. This is why questions about whether Starmer best resembles Tony Blair in 1997 or Neil Kinnock in 1992 are misleading. He really is something new. What the British establishment wants is an inquisitor, and in Keir Starmer they have found one.

Never mind the flip-flops; those are inconsequential:

Starmerism is a policy of vengeance against the Enemies of Society; its precise position on taxation, disposable vapes or Israel-Palestine is of no moment. For those who wish to oppose Keir Starmer and what he represents, the charge of inconsistency may be a useful one. But it’s an illusion. It does not reckon with the baroque strangeness of Starmer and his project. For his opponents, the salient danger is not that Keir Starmer feigns outrage for opportunistic reasons. The danger is that he really means it.

Scary.

Don’t forget that there are still radical Corbynistas within Labour’s Parliamentary ranks. He will have to placate them, too. And there is just enough common ground between them — i.e. agreeing on ‘the Enemies of Society’ — that Starmer could do very well as PM for the first six months to a year.

However, for me, the fundamental problem is that the Corbynistas will still want to prevail. I do think there will be a coup after the first year of his premiership. Now, he might use the law — Labour Party rules — against them as he did a few years ago. However, there could also be a lot of in-fighting going on between a ‘moderate’ Labour agenda and a more radical one. Who would win?

We will have to wait and see.

I will have more on Sir Keir Starmer tomorrow.