Keir Starmer can be a hard man to read. Even now, focus groups complain that they’re not quite sure what he stands for – though he has come off the fence on enough divisive issues now, from Gaza to imposing VAT on private school fees, to give them a pretty clear idea. Still, some quality about him seems oddly elusive. The backstory we will all hear endlessly in the run-up to the election – that his father was a rather emotionally distant toolmaker with whom he had a difficult relationship, his mother a nurse who suffered terribly with a painful form of arthritis, and that they raised four children on a tight budget in a pebble-dashed semi – explains him to some extent. But he tells it still with a slight stiffness that leaves many wondering if there isn’t something more. A genuinely revealing account of the rather private man currently on course to lead the country feels badly overdue.
The former journalist turned spin doctor Tom Baldwin is at pains to insist this isn’t an authorised biography, but it doesn’t seem entirely unauthorised either. Baldwin was originally recruited to help the Labour leader with a memoir he had been persuaded to write in 2022, when still struggling to break through against Boris Johnson. A year later, riding much higher in the polls, Starmer backed out of a publishing deal about which he had always been ambivalent – but agreed to cooperate with the more conventional biography Baldwin proposed writing instead.
