In 1982, in an ancient Morris Minor he had bought by “putting holes in metal” all summer for his tool-maker father, Keir Starmer left home for Leeds University. “With every mile that went by, I told myself I was never going back,” he tells his biographer Tom Baldwin “with unusual force”.
A bright working-class kid from an unlovely backwater has two choices: stay or leave. Starmer chose the latter, putting behind him the tiny bunk-bedded room he shared with a brother with severe learning difficulties, who wasn’t going anywhere. Away from his domineering, fun-sucking father, who thought pasta “foreign food”, his chronically sick mum, and the rundown, gloomy house crammed with dogs and disappointment. To what, he didn’t even know.
Until now details of Starmer’s early life have been extracted from him like teeth. A few soundbites about his nurse mother and carer sister inserted into NHS speeches. Yet never enough to paint out the public perception that this barrister, public prosecutor and knight of the realm is a privileged north London ponce, a bleeding-heart, human-rights citizen of nowhere, soft-handed, lofty and dull. Someone who’d recoil in horror from white van man, let alone buy him a pint.
Yet his story is of a class journey that will resonate with anyone who was the first in their family to attend university. And it explains much about Starmer, including his reticence in sharing his life history at all. Because entering a middle-class milieu, where people your age can ski or speak Italian, the last thing you’d do is reveal your unsophistication. These days a tough background is valorised; back then it was a source of shame. Rather than risk being seen as gauche or common, you’d keep shtoom and try to pass as one of them.
Arriving at Leeds to study law, Starmer says it suddenly dawned on him he had “neither met a lawyer nor really knew what they did”. He had picked his profession purely to please his parents, who would have thought an arts degree too frivolous. Yet his fellow students were born into legal families, knew how to navigate the labyrinthine system, had interned with London firms. Starmer levelled the playing field the only way he could: working harder than anyone else. His housemates speak of his ferocious focus, an ex-girlfriend of his “forward propulsion”.
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Forge on, don’t look back. Upward social mobility is like a video game where you must conquer each level before moving to the next. Starmer didn’t consider becoming a barrister until he had excelled as an Oxford postgrad, didn’t feel worthy of being director of public prosecutions until he had proved his legal mind by writing, among other things, a 900-page book on human rights, now a law school text, and a 1,500-page work on human rights in Africa. (Serious pieces of scholarship, not Nadine Dorries novels.)
He didn’t aspire to be an MP until, at the pinnacle of his profession, he grew frustrated with the law. This dogged ascent explains why, if elected, Starmer will be the oldest person to become prime minister since Mr Bootstraps himself, James Callaghan.
Yet as he mastered the establishment’s game, others knew all the hacks. Think of the vaulting confidence of chancellor Jeremy Hunt who, on graduating from Oxford, left a note for his friend Mark Field saying “See you in Westminster”. And so it came to pass: both became Tory MPs. Or Rory Stewart, raised to be a Great Man whom the Earth’s people, whether Afghan tribes or Scottish crofters, would hail as their liege, and who asked David Cameron about a cabinet post before he had made the candidates list let alone won a seat. Or Boris “World King” Johnson, failing ever upwards, towards No 10.
What would Eton have done for “Superboy” Starmer, as his siblings called him, with his aptitude in everything from music to sport. Instead of arguing about politics on the school bus, he would have led the debating team. Instead of maths and physics A-levels — which he didn’t enjoy or excel at, but which pleased his dad — he would have been academically nurtured. Then the usual: Oxbridge, the Bar, a safe seat in his late thirties.
But then he’d be what? Your basic politician. Not this surprisingly scrappy, hyper-competitive man, once a bit tasty with his fists, whose physicality meant when some posh prat glitter-bombed him he didn’t flinch. His hard route up, via death row cases in authoritarian regimes, has given him a useful and unexpected ruthlessness. The lack of safety net for those from his background has made him a stickler for rules but frozen by fear of some unconsidered infraction in front of TV cameras. His mother’s suffering means he’s “slightly intolerant of those who complain about being ill all the time even if there isn’t much wrong with them”, which must inform his pledge to get two million on sickness benefits back to work.
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Crucially it has made him wary of ideology, grandstanding and “luxury beliefs”. Of some parliamentary rumpus not dissimilar to the Gaza chaos, he says: “They all go home saying that’s been a huge day while I’m left scratching my head because none of that has changed anything.” Instead of a politico, his chief of staff is an unshowy civil servant, deep in detail on how to make things work.
There is no greater rocket fuel for success than the urge to leave your small town. But whoever you become, whatever your bold twenty-something pledges, an invisible thread draws you back to be confronted with what made you, and the fate of those you left behind. That connection, if you aspire to be prime minister, is worth more than any vision thing.
