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“When people say I might be gone in a year or two, they’re just making the mistake others have made about me in the past,” Keir Starmer told me recently, eyes unblinking behind his glasses.
Certainly, the political careers of those who made this mistake of underestimating him now rot in graves dotted around Westminster. They include not only three Conservative prime ministers, but also his immediate predecessor as Labour leader and countless others who failed to realise how ruthless Starmer can be until – for them – it was too late.
And yet, despite such salutary examples, it has become fashionable once again over recent days to portray the prime minister as a bit-part player in his own story, or even the figurehead of a ship being steered by others who might throw him overboard if the waters get much choppier.
The reason for this has been the publication of Get In, by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, two serious journalists who have provided an extraordinarily detailed and sometimes bloodstained account of Labour’s transformation over the past five years, from which Starmer himself is often notably absent. Instead, the book revolves around Morgan McSweeney, the strategist who masterminded the party’s election landslide in July.
In part, this is a function of the authors’ sources, and a genre of “inside-the-bunker” political writing which elevates the role of advisers such as Dominic Cummings above that of elected leaders who are necessarily less accessible to journalists. But even Starmer’s closest friends would also recognise this ostensibly unpolitical politician has a tendency to subcontract some of the most unpalatable aspects of a profession he entered only in middle age to people who have known little else in their lives.
Many of these intensely political aides and advisers instinctively cluster around McSweeney who, though not as vain or self-publicising as Cummings, has developed something akin to a cult-like status among some of them. For instance, the latest edition of my biography of Starmer describes how his admirers at party HQ began queueing outside a south London sandwich shop during the election campaign when they found out it was where their hero bought his lunch.
McSweeney understands the danger of all this, not least to himself. He is particularly unhappy about quotes attributed to him comparing his boss to “an HR manager, not a leader” – or those of an unnamed adviser suggesting Starmer is merely a pretend driver sat at the front of a vehicle controlled by similarly unseen hands. The chief of staff has been at pains to point out to anyone who will listen that he only serves at the prime minister’s bidding and that this latest job is his sixth, each tailored to “different circumstances and different electorates”, for a leader whose demands of him have changed with the times.
Such an analysis, however, only opens a familiar and much bigger question: if this government is not defined by the internal battles which made Labour electable, nor the campaign which won the election, for what purpose exactly was it elected?
It is Starmer himself, not any backroom adviser or Labour faction, who must provide the answer. His task of building a coherent governing strategy is, of course, made more difficult by the ground shaking beneath his feet. From Donald Trump’s seismic activity on the other side of the Atlantic to the surging support here for Reform’s own rightwing populism in those “red wall” working-class seats that McSweeney had so effectively targeted during the campaign.
Last week, there was some excitement when Starmer railed against the complacency of “progressive liberals” as he told cabinet colleagues they must be “the insurgents and disruptors” on behalf of working people left behind by globalisation.
Some might interpret this as a sign that the government is preparing a lurch into its own kind of “Blue Labour” populism, confusing admiration for Trump’s boldness in rolling out policy with approval for content that trashes everything from net zero to the rule of law. Then, right on cue, there was a fresh wave of the orchestrated briefing Starmer loathes, this time against energy secretary Ed Miliband and the attorney general, Richard Hermer, who are among the very few in politics who the prime minister counts as friends.
But what was not reported from Starmer’s remarks to the cabinet last week was what he went on to say. He talked about how Britain may be the last G7 country still to have a centre-left government in the next few years and how they had a responsibility to prevent this era being “defined by rightwing populists” preaching “nonsense” about making people pay for healthcare or introducing flat-rate taxes. He emphasised the need to show “respect” to ordinary people who feel looked down upon, like his own father had been, as a necessary condition to restoring faith in the ability of progressive government to deliver real improvement in real lives.
For all the focus on Brexit-backing voters, most ministers would recognise the government won’t get the economic growth it so desperately needs to achieve anything unless it does more to mitigate the deep damage done by leaving the EU. Nor, if it wants to be re-elected, can it afford to take for granted middle-class remain voters in the same way the last Labour government did with its working-class support 25 years ago.
Although the government must address anger about levels of immigration, it would be utterly counterproductive to do so by depriving British businesses and public services of skilled staff recruited from abroad. More than anything, it has to deliver on health, housing and living standards at a time when there is little money to spend and the world outside is on fire.
This feels more like the authentic and necessarily nuanced voice of Starmer. Recognising the complexity and difficulty of the challenges ahead doesn’t stop the government from being “insurgent” and “disruptive”, but instead requires it to be so. His impatience for change reflects the connection he has to the real world from his own life that, unlike most of those who work for him, has mostly been spent outside politics.
It is this resilient, relentlessly determined personality that now needs to become the character of the government. Starmer himself must provide the direction his government needs. And no one, whether they watch from outside Downing Street or work within it, should make the mistake of underestimating him.
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Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography
