The sheer velocity with which Keir Starmer has led the Labour Party from the brink of extinction to the brink of power is unprecedented in the modern era. And – just in time – this excellent biography arrives in what is all but certain to be an election year.
Starmer is, as Baldwin writes, “someone who is both extraordinary and very ordinary”; and this tension is what lies at the heart of his politics and his character. As a working-class boy from Hurst Green in Surrey who grew up to become Director of Public Prosecutions and, more probably than not, Prime Minister, he is self-evidently exceptional.
