Class in the political rumble is both sword and shield: a weapon of attack if you are a Labour insurgent aiming to seize power from “out-of-touch” Tories (a Starmer talking point) and a defensive rally if you are criticised for solecisms — “I speak like people do where I grew up” (his deputy Angela Rayner).
It is a theme that stalks Tom Baldwin’s assiduous new biography of Keir Starmer. On one reading of his background and rise, the leader of the Opposition is everything that riles those who see London’s professional and political circles as a bubble of privilege and self-advancement.
Barrister-turned-head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer has a knighthood, lives in shabby-chic Kentish Town, attended a top Surrey grammar which went private as he entered its sixth form, played the flute as a Saturday student at the Guildhall and acquired the edge of high-performer entitlement, captured in the story of his wife Victoria’s first (professional) encounter with him on the phone which left her muttering to a colleague: “Who the f*** does he think he is?”
Looked at another way, his upbringing was hardscrabble and pitted by uncertainty and stress. He had a disabled mother, a compulsive and distant father and brother with severe learning difficulties. The family’s ramshackle house had “holes in the wall and bits of masonry missing” and windows boarded up when money was too tight to fix a window pane. He got into Leeds Uni on not-so-great grades and then got a post-grad slot at Oxford, grafting his way through legal pupillage, living in a grotty flat on Archway Road. In all this, we might well see a dedicated slogger, rather than a smug member of the liberal Left inner circle.
Starmer’s story is a reminder that status is not as fixed as either class warriors or snobs would have us believe
Like so many other stories in the capital, Starmer’s is a reminder that status is not really as fixed as either class warriors or snobs would like us to believe.
People can be more than one thing in their lives and how we see them is really a Rorschach test of our own predilections. Meritocratic advances are also hard work and that shapes people too. Starmer is at once an affable and a tense person.
That occurred to me while spending time with him to discuss his foreign policy outlook last year on a podcast. I noticed how closely he followed neat Post-it notes he had written himself. Afterwards on a sunny terrace in Montreal at a centre-Left gathering conference where everyone was having drinks and swapping gossip, he would alternately relax and then suddenly stiffen with apprehension if he thought the subject risky or he felt unprepared.
It may be one reason why although successful in forging a path to office for Labour, he does not yet feel like a settled figure in the public’s mind — stereotypical politicians can be easier to grasp and like or loathe — but status and who gets it, and how, is now fungible.
Conservatives too have more prominent figures who do not fit the old taxonomy of Etonian and Wykehamist “poshos” and a few Essex Tories and comprehensive school outliers in the mix. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary and heat-seeking Tory missile, is a prime example. She spent an itinerant childhood between the UK, United States and Nigeria. Looked at one way, she is a doctor and physiologist’s daughter from a well-travelled family with a cut-glass accent.
But there was also a tougher start in adult life. Her time in Nigeria coincided with political tensions and shortages which left her “doing homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power”. At 16, she came to the UK to live with a family friend, doing her A-levels at a further education college in Morden, earning her pocket money in a McDonald’s.
For all the dissimilarities between these two, there is something impressive in their refusal to fit into easy boxes. Badenoch may be the antithesis of Starmer’s restraint; her dressing down this week of Henry Staunton, the Post Office chair she had dispensed with after he shared a disobliging version of their clash, was what one minister calls a classic “Kemi hairdryer” moment.
Whether Badenoch ultimately succeeds to the tattered Tory crown or not, she joins Starmer in having that hunger to be leader that is the essential ingredient. Neither, had we met them as teenagers swotting in back bedrooms in Lagos or Reigate, would have struck us as having a steady glide path into power circles. And yet there they are. That’s due credit to them both and to London, the city that can break the class ceiling.
