Starmer tends to speak in a language of moral absolutes, but his speech that evening was neither a Corbynite meditation on good and evil, nor a clarion call for a new kind of politics. Rather, it was a straightforward elevator pitch. With a flair and levity that seems to escape him on television, he told members that he was the best person to take on – and defeat – Boris Johnson. “I really do think that man is dangerous,” he said. Corbyn and his politics, he told them, had been unfairly maligned by the press – but had still lost Labour December’s general election. He could break the cycle. [...]
Yet few will profess to knowing the real Keir Starmer. Some even contend that his leadership campaign has been an exercise in hiding from view. His pledges over the course of the campaign have, at times, seemed contradictory: he will not “oversteer” away from Corbyn’s radicalism on the economy, but he will curb the leadership’s worst excesses, win back lost ground in the south, as well as the north and Midlands, and exorcise the demons of factionalism from Labour’s ranks. Officially, Starmer calls it the politics of unity: a word that is emblazoned across his campaign material and baked into almost every line of his stump speeches. Corbyn’s enforced departure presented Labour MPs, the trade unions and its membership with an existential choice: does it continue along the road that led to a fourth successive election defeat, or veer away? If Long-Bailey’s pitch is the former, and Nandy’s the latter, then Starmer’s aim is to convince members that they can have both. [...]
His politics are continental but are not the “bland centrism” criticised by supporters of Long-Bailey. “He was very much what Europeans would now call a red-green,” said the QC Gavin Millar, who interviewed Starmer for his pupillage in 1987 and later shared rooms with him in a set of Middle Temple chambers run by Emlyn Hooson, the radical Liberal MP who had defended the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Growing up, Starmer had never knowingly met a lawyer: Geoffrey Robertson, another QC and pioneer of the progressive bar, described how he turned up for the interview in a cardigan, was “nervous and awkward”, and “looked about 14”. By then Starmer had moved into a flat above a brothel in Highgate, where he devoted himself to work. Stacked high about his room were boxes of Socialist Alternatives, an obscure and atrociously written Trotksyite pamphlet, for which he was once a co-editor. [...]
Starmer decided against prosecuting the police officers responsible for the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube having been wrongly identified as a terror suspect following the London attacks of 2005, and of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper seller pushed to his death at the G20 protests in 2010. Under his leadership, the CPS charged anti-austerity protesters for staging a sit-in at Fortnum & Mason in 2012; one academic accused Starmer, who once defended the rights of acid house ravers, of criminalising peaceful assembly and protests.
