I REMEMBER meeting him on a street in Oxford through a mutual acquaintance. It was the month Donald Trump won the election. He was wearing a Breton T-shirt and pea coat. Good posture. Firm handshake. Clean cut. Handsome, I thought. Same as today.
But now Keir Mather, the new Labour MP for Selby and Ainsty, sports a suit and red tie. At 25, he is parliament’s youngest MP.
He was ready for the job when we met, as a pair of 18-year old history students in our first term. Looking back, he arrived at Oxford fully formed. His strong speaking voice was interpolated with flat Humberside vowels, and so we had something in common by the fact of our northern-ness. The accent hid a faintly bourgeois background. There once circulated a photo of Mather, aged four, grinning in his prep school uniform. He was even wearing a cap.
His ambition was clear from the seriousness with which he undertook student politics
Mather insisted he had only attended for a short time before moving to a state school, and joked that he would have to bury the photo if he ever became a Labour MP. I haven’t seen it since.
His ambition was clear from the seriousness with which he undertook student politics. I was semi-adjacent as a student journalist, an only slightly less lame pastime. I recall a month when he messaged me at what felt like a daily frequency. He asked that I trudge to a college on the outskirts of town, sit through a meeting of the Oxford University Labour Club and then, at the end of proceedings, cast a vote for him to become its chair, from which Corbynites were trying to block him.
I never did turn up to vote for him. Through some mysterious effort he still won. Our acquaintance dwindled thereafter. I had let him down, after all. And then, the day I became editor of the student newspaper, he popped up again on my phone with a message congratulating me and offering himself up as a source of quotes on Labour stories.
Mather seemed from observation to have only a handful of real friends with whom he was open, and a much wider circle from whom he thought he could get something. I was briefly one of them. Now he is moving on to better things.
