“Keir doesn’t engage in the political process. He got this far by not expressing any political opinions … He’s good with people, but he doesn’t debate big ideas.”
After 200 pages of a compelling new book about the Labour party’s return to power, the story falls into a run of these quotations. Get In, by the Westminster journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, makes it clear that after he became the Labour leader, Keir Starmer developed an incredible ruthlessness. Casting him as the kind of operator who ought to be renowned for the trail of human wreckage they leave in their wake, the book highlights the “many people whose careers have come to a brutal end at Starmer’s remorseless hand”. His readiness to behave like that, however, does not come from any ideological zeal, but rather its opposite: an absence of convictions and ideals that means he can shape-shift – and dispatch colleagues and allies – with a blithe ease.
