Who is Keir Starmer?
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Roy Jenkins once famously said of Tony Blair’s approach to being leader of the opposition that it was “like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”. This “caution first” approach clearly paid off for Blair, who went on to win in a landslide. Could this go some way to explaining the somewhat cautious campaign run by Keir Starmer?
Starmer won’t particularly thank me for comparing him to Blair. He’s trying to build a coalition across a fractured Labour Party and has refused to be pigeon-holed into one faction or another. This can be seen in his extraordinary team, which includes Kat Fletcher and Simon Fletcher (no relation), both of whom worked for Corbyn. His staff also includes Matt Pound, who previously worked for the moderate Labour First faction.
What these people all have in common is a reputation for competence and organisation. Pound, for example, helped moderates to organise in many local Labour Party associations. That background will have been invaluable in ensuring that Starmer got a total of 374 nominations to be on the ballot — 211 more than his nearest rival Rebecca Long-Bailey. Meanwhile, Kat Fletcher organised volunteers for Ed Miliband’s underdog campaign in 2010 and Jeremy Corbyn’s extraordinary rise in 2015. She knows how to win inside the party but, at the same time, has remained a popular figure across the factions.
Rather than ideological, Starmer’s choices in this race represent a pragmatism that reflects the lawyerly nature of the man himself. Starmer comes from a working class background. He studied first at Leeds and then Oxford, becoming a barrister in 1987. He specialised in human rights cases and became most prominent when representing (pro-bono) the campaigners Helen Steele and David Morris in the “McLibel’” case. He also previously worked defending striking miners and those prosecuted for non-payment of the Poll Tax.
Starmer ultimately went on to become Director of Public Prosecutions. Overall, despite being a left-wing lawyer with a reputation for defending the underdog and, therefore, something of an unusual choice, he was broadly successful in that role. He was criticised for not bringing charges in the case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and confusion over the charges in the death of Ian Tomlinson after he was struck by police. But anyone in that role will have to make high profile and complicated decisions and his reputation in the legal profession remains good.
Starmer, the only man still in the race, is the favourite, despite the previous calls from all corners of the party that the next leader should be a woman. It’s fair to say though that he does have decent feminist credentials. Just before leaving his role as DPP, he launched an inquiry into low levels of reporting of rape and domestic violence. When he left that role in 2013, he was immediately contracted by the Labour Party to lead an inquiry into giving victims of rape and child abuse greater rights and support. However, were he to win, one early test will be in how he overcomes the optics problem of Labour, the party of the All Women Shortlist, remaining the only major UK political party to have never had a female leader. Expect a lot of pressure on him to break another glass ceiling and appoint a woman to the role of Shadow Chancellor.
I think he’ll probably do this, but largely because he will want to, rather than as a result of external encouragement. Given his behaviour during the campaign, I wouldn’t expect Sir Keir to bow to pressure easily. He has navigated some of the trickier areas of this contest with a natural and deft political instinct. For example, his campaign ignored calls to release details of his funders, despite all the Twitter noise. When that information was eventually released, there was nothing awkward at all. The increasingly shrill demands and speculation were made to look foolish.
At times, Starmer’s unity pitch has led to the accusation that he’s overly-cautious. This does not seem to have done his campaign any harm. He may currently be something of a tabula rasa, but he is definitely one that a majority of Labour members seem willing to trust. As the UK enters one of the worst crises in its history, a reputation for being competent and unflappable may make Starmer the perfect foil for Boris Johnson’s populism.
