Review: unofficial Starmer biography – could Sir Keir be interesting after all?

Keir Starmer: A Life of Contrasts by Nigel Cawthorne (Gibson Square Books), £20.

The best politicians live by their stories. Barack Obama had his first memoir published at thirty-four, Boris Johnson at thirty-eight. Winston Churchill was just twenty-six when his Boer War heroics first caught the attention of the reading public.

There has been no such promotion for Sir Keir Starmer. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Around the time Johnson began his scribbling career at The Times, Starmer was championing re-nationalisation for Socialist Alternatives, a radical student magazine he edited at Oxford University.

Forty years on, the Leader of the Opposition seems glad to have traded his youth radicalism for a neat haircut and a crisp suit. “More copies of that magazine ended up under my bed than distributed to the world at large,” Starmer told Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs last year.

If the past few months have shown anything, however, it is that a sheen of respectability doesn’t win votes, while playing up your achievements – or letting advantageous rumours hang around – can. This is an art of politics Starmer has yet to learn.

The truth is that we still know little of the man who could be Prime Minister. Nigel Cawthorne’s new Starmer biography, A Life of Contrasts, tries to set the record straight while remaining faithful to the primary evidence, which is scarce. There is no memoir of the boy from the Surrey council house who became a barrister; the former anti-monarchist who joined Queen’s Counsel at age thirty-nine; the radical who became Director of Public Prosecutions, the highest tribunal of law and order in the land, at age forty-five. What Starmer has described of himself, writes Cawthorne, reveals only a “nebula of purpose”.

It is a mystery that threatens to prolong the Labour party’s parliamentary exile, with Starmer failing to make an impression on voters. “The QC who always had the perfect answer for justice in others’ intricate problems was almost dismayed by people’s uncomplicated and less than perfect interest in him,” Cawthorne writes.

So who is the man really? If one of Cawthorne’s aims is to show that, despite appearances, Starmer really is from a “genuinely working-class background”, it is also to show that he is a man of conflicting duties and identities, reflective of a conflicted moment in British history. Cawthorne himself was a student at Reigate Grammar years before Starmer arrived in 1976. Both, he writes, were beneficiaries of “the last gasp of effortless social mobility” that propelled Cawthorne into political journalism and Starmer to the top of the legal priesthood before the abolition of grammar schools. It is this dualism – working-class modesty, meritocratic triumph – that frames Keir’s many contrasts.

Unlike the elite Tony Blair, to whom Starmer is blandly compared today, Starmer’s politics is what Cawthorne calls a “non-aligned, conscience-driven” socialism. His occupation with the NHS has a lot to do with his mother’s long-term battle with Still’s Disease. His views on social justice come not only from years of lawyering for rape victims and those on death row but from working at a Cornwall nursing home during his gap year.

Why is it that these personal struggles are only just coming to light? Political biographies usually want to skip to the action but some of the most gripping chapters here are on Starmer’s education. We are told of the struggle to keep Reigate Grammar free to the clever working-class kids like Keir: his was the last cohort to be offered free tuition at a school that now charges upwards of £10,000 a year for day pupils. The irony that “Blairite” Starmer went state while the actual Blair went to Fettes (and Starmer’s young idol, Tony Benn, went to Westminster) is not lost on Cawthorne, who takes pains to point out the current school fees for each of these private schools. It is a touch that adds a sense of claustrophobia to the supporting cast of politicians and barristers who populate Starmer’s life from eighteen onwards. Even a young Boris Johnson features, punting up Fleet Street, eagerly making his way to his office on Doughty Street.

Starmer is less comfortable in this new world than his philandering opposite number, however. On the campaign trail for the Labour leadership, he had to take questions from the audience just as his wife’s mother had died. “I had been trying to be the best husband I could be to my wife… Then I’m asked, ‘What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done?” And I’m judged on that.’” For Starmer, authenticity means a certain shielding, an aloofness from the political fandom, which backfires versus the Johnson show. “I do not need to have a label – I know who I am,” he told Desert Island Discs. Cawthorne’s Starmer biography reveals a man who would rather dig deep into his work than into himself.

His achievements are admirable. Starmer was pivotal in abolishing the death penalty in Uganda and numerous Caribbean countries as a human rights barrister. He worked pro bono defending civil liberties cases from free speech to domestic violence. He has a knighthood – you can’t get more patriotic than that. No current label – not “woke warrior”, nor “Blairite” or “global elite” ­– quite does justice to Starmer’s professional life.

So the small things matter. Starmer once had to be restrained from punching a man overheard advocating the death penalty while on a case in the Caribbean. He began his first day as MP for St. Pancras and Holborn on crutches after tearing a muscle during an over-enthusiastic football game. Starmer is football mad with, according to a fellow QC, a “silky left foot”. Why he hasn’t made more of this side to him is beyond me.

A Life of Contrasts is a limpid biography at its finest, but it’s by no means comprehensive. The need to trace the dots occasionally leads Cawthorne to make rather obvious conjectures. “Starmer can see multiple sides to every issue because he has lived those opinions himself,” he concludes in the final chapter, “but had to do work to become a big-picture thinker.” Sure.

Yet, this first evaluation of the man is valuable not for its detail, as interesting and necessary as it is. The book is proof that Starmer, “a man of hidden shallows”, has a story to tell. If only he knew how to tell it himself.