Tom Baldwin’s biography of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, first published before last year’s election, was based on many hours spent with Starmer, his family, and senior Labour Party colleagues. This remarkable level of access led to a surprisingly intimate portrait of an intensely private politician, and the book has now been updated to include coverage of Starmer’s first year in office. Baldwin profiled Starmer for The Observer in June, and that interview is expanded in the revised paperback of Keir Starmer: The Biography.
Baldwin is a former Times and Telegraph journalist, though he was also head of communications for Labour throughout the coalition government, so his biography is broadly sympathetic to its subject. He acknowledges that he isn’t an impartial observer, and describes Starmer as “a man whom I both like and trust but sometimes find hard to fathom.” And the PM’s colleagues seemingly feel the same way about him: “Those who have worked closely with Starmer mix deep affection with tearing-their-hair-out frustration because they... yearn for a clearly defined project that identifies their purpose. They want a ‘Starmerism’. And he just won’t give them one.”
In his introduction, Baldwin makes clear that “it’s only fair to warn those hoping to find these pages apattered with blood that they will be disappointed.” The other key Starmer book published this year, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, seems brutally direct in comparison, and Baldwin accurately describes it as “a blood-stained account of Labour’s transformation over the past five years, in which Starmer himself was largely absent.”
Maguire and Pogrund quote a Starmer advisor saying: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” (The Docklands Light Railway uses driverless trains.) Get In leaves the reader in no doubt that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is in the driving seat — and that its authors have the same access to high-level Labour sources as Andrew Rawnsley had in the New Labour era.
Baldwin is a former Times and Telegraph journalist, though he was also head of communications for Labour throughout the coalition government, so his biography is broadly sympathetic to its subject. He acknowledges that he isn’t an impartial observer, and describes Starmer as “a man whom I both like and trust but sometimes find hard to fathom.” And the PM’s colleagues seemingly feel the same way about him: “Those who have worked closely with Starmer mix deep affection with tearing-their-hair-out frustration because they... yearn for a clearly defined project that identifies their purpose. They want a ‘Starmerism’. And he just won’t give them one.”
In his introduction, Baldwin makes clear that “it’s only fair to warn those hoping to find these pages apattered with blood that they will be disappointed.” The other key Starmer book published this year, Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, seems brutally direct in comparison, and Baldwin accurately describes it as “a blood-stained account of Labour’s transformation over the past five years, in which Starmer himself was largely absent.”
Maguire and Pogrund quote a Starmer advisor saying: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” (The Docklands Light Railway uses driverless trains.) Get In leaves the reader in no doubt that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is in the driving seat — and that its authors have the same access to high-level Labour sources as Andrew Rawnsley had in the New Labour era.
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