Source: Sunday Times
Talk of this being his worst week was questionable even before the party’s by-election wins. A new biography reveals how he once came much closer to the edge — and what he really thinks of Jeremy Corbyn and Sue Gray
Tom Baldwin
Saturday February 17 2024, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
By the end of 2020, Keir Starmer’s forensic approach to the government’s handling of Covid began to bear fruit, with Boris Johnson facing growing criticism for chaotic and deadly decision-making. Having started 20 per cent behind with voters, the Labour Party — now shorn of its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn — came level, or was even inching ahead.
But the polls came down for Labour with the Christmas decorations. As Britain entered the new year, it got Covid jabs earlier than in Europe and Johnson’s long-time immunity to any form of criticism got a booster. “There is undoubtedly a vaccine bounce going on,” admitted Starmer at the time. “You can feel it.”
This went deeper, however, than a little surge of optimism in the veins of a traumatised electorate. All those graphs showing the peaks and troughs of infection waves had served to conceal underlying trends in politics. At some point, when the coronavirus was under control, life would revert to normal. And there was every reason to believe “normal” would mean Labour slipping to election defeat in the same way it had ever since 2005.
In the previous eight months, Starmer had made a meaningful impression with voters on only two issues: the government’s handling of the pandemic and the suspension of Corbyn. The first was no longer working in Labour’s favour and the second had been more a reaction to events than a political strategy.
In both, his approach had been lawyerly and iterative without setting out the big vision or making the emotional connection with voters that was said to be needed if Labour was to achieve that longed-for “cut-through”.
Falling off a cliff
Morgan McSweeney, who had masterminded Starmer’s leadership campaign, began to argue that “things would have to get worse before they could get better”, or, as he told colleagues: “We needed to adopt a J-curve approach.” The theory has been used to explain everything from the rise of nations to the performance of private equity, but it’s also a model for turning around failing organisations.
According to one academic exposition, there are five stages to a J-curve: the “plateau” where old ways remain unchallenged; the “cliff” over which to leap; the “valley” that must be crossed towards change; the “ascent” as the benefits of it become apparent; before eventually the “mountaintop” is reached.
In an internal strategy memorandum, McSweeney said the damage done under Corbyn was “such that we must change more profoundly than we have accepted until now, we must embrace the conflict [with the Corbynite wing of the party] that is inevitable, and we must show the public that our vision is something worth fighting for”. He was explicit that the strategy of bringing together a fractious party, for which Starmer had campaigned only a few months earlier, needed to be abandoned.
By the time Starmer had signed off McSweeney’s new strategy on April 17, 2021, the next stage of the J-curve — the cliff — was already looming into view. The party was hurtling towards the crumbling edges of a still-hostile electorate, with more than 5,000 English council seats and a dozen directly elected mayors were up for grabs in local elections. And there was little anyone could do to stop “things getting worse”.
There was another and even more pressing problem: Starmer had also decided to fight a by-election in a red wall constituency his party had held ever since its inception. Hartlepool had fallen vacant because Mike Hill had decided to quit following a decision by the Labour leader to throw him out of the parliamentary party over sexual assault allegations.
The Labour leader saw the swift response to the allegations against Hill, an MP who had backed him for the leadership, as a way of showing the party was changing and he thought the by-election provided an opportunity to start winning back voters in seats like this. It was his first real chance to campaign in person since the start of the pandemic and he visited Hartlepool no fewer than three times.
But on May 6, the day of the election, the Tories won Hartlepool with a majority of almost 7,000 and a swing against Labour of 16 per cent. There was not much comfort to be taken from results elsewhere. Labour was still in third place in Scotland and had lost council seats overall in England. Critics from both left and right were lining up to take a shot at Starmer.
“Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result,” tweeted the former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott with scarcely concealed glee.
Time to go?
For several hours that Friday, Starmer was ready to agree with this assessment. “I felt like I had been kicked in the guts,” he says. “The result was terrible and I had a moment where I thought we are not going to be able to do this.” When he arrived in the office that morning — after having to barge his way through a pack of photographers on his doorstep — the Labour leader told aides he was going to resign.
Chris Ward, his former close aide, recalls: “Keir kept saying that he felt he would have to go, that the result showed the party was going backwards and he saw it as a personal rejection. I told him it was far too soon for that kind of thing, but it was a rocky few hours.”
Such a reaction puzzles many people who have spent their entire careers in politics and are used to leaders whose first instinct is to cling to whatever power they have. But those are the same people who are cynical when Starmer says, as he does repeatedly, that: “I am not in this for me, this is about duty and service.”
Asked about the Hartlepool result now, he talks about reading biographies of politicians who had spent their lives yearning to be leader of their party and says: “I’m not fulfilling some lifelong dream here. I could happily work in the bookshop or something.”
Leaving home in London on the morning after the Hartepool by-election in May 2021
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
As Ward puts it: “Keir regards his role solely as a means to an end of achieving change. If he becomes the obstacle to it, he’ll get out of the way.” This stance meant, however, that on May 7, 2021, the morning after the Hartlepool defeat, Starmer had to be persuaded not only that he could continue as Labour leader but also that he still had a viable chance of winning the next general election.
Calls were made to Vic, the Labour leader’s wife, who told him not to act in haste. Ed Fitzgerald, who had always been a source of wisdom and humour for Starmer during his legal career, recalls that day as “a rather dark one for Keir”, adding: “I may have told him he could always come back to Doughty Street and be a barrister again.”
McSweeney arrived and made his case once more for “why Hartlepool had to happen”, but the theory of change he had mapped out on paper was now looking terrifying in reality. It was, said one of those in the leader’s office that day, “a near-death experience”. At around 4pm that day, Starmer picked himself up off the floor and finally delivered a broadcast response to the defeat.
Speaking in his Westminster office, he couldn’t have offered a greater contrast on the evening news to Boris Johnson. The prime minister was shown doing a victory lap around Hartlepool while above floated an inflatable Boris, grinning broadly with arms aloft and thumbs up.
The inflatable Boris Johnson erected in Hartlepool became a symbol of his political peak
IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES
Nonetheless, anyone listening to the Labour leader that day would have heard a clear signal of his determination to force himself and his party through the hard yards ahead. There was none of the “mixed bag of results” and “making progress elsewhere” stuff that political leaders usually come up with. “We have been talking to ourselves instead of to the country and we have lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool,” said Starmer. “I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that.”
Has anyone told Angela?
Just 24 hours after almost resigning, a steelier Starmer was back, preparing for a shadow cabinet reshuffle in his office. On a whiteboard McSweeney had optimistically scrawled the words: “Change Labour, change Britain.” But staff were exhausted, nerves were frayed and mistakes were still being made. There were leaks to the media about Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, and Angela Rayner, the campaign co-ordinator, being removed from their posts.
The former, who was replaced by Rachel Reeves and given a new job as chair of the party overseeing policy, took her demotion well enough. It was a different story with Rayner. She was downstairs in Labour headquarters preparing for a series of TV interviews and was told her meeting with Starmer had been put back an hour.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but he was upstairs making decisions,” says the deputy leader. “My staff member comes to me and says, ‘I don’t know quite how to tell you, but the papers are asking if we want to make a comment on you being sacked.’ I’m like, ‘What!’ That was when Keir popped his head around the door and said, ‘Are you ready?’ And I replied, ‘Yeah!’”
Rayner describes the conversation that followed as “robust”, which is usually a polite way of saying there was a lot of swearing. “I made very clear what my views were at the time,” she says. Rumours swirled of a possible breakdown in relations or a leadership challenge.
Starmer and Angela Rayner on the campaign trail in Seaton Carew, days before the Hartlepool by-election
IAN FORSYTH/PA
Although Starmer got his way in removing her from the post of election co-ordinator and replacing her with Shabana Mahmood, Rayner emerged with a clutch of portfolios that included shadowing the Cabinet Office, a new post looking at the future of workers’ rights, while also retaining influence over party matters as deputy leader. Starmer says his decision to move her “had nothing to do with the Hartlepool result — I was beating myself up about that much more than blaming anyone else — but Ange felt I was making her carry the can”.
He concedes they had a rocky patch, “which our relationship is probably stronger for now”, adding: “Everybody and everything had to toughen up after that week. If we kept losing, there was no point in any of us being there.”
Part two: Did Starmer really stand up to Corbyn?
Starmer has compared the final years of being in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet to a footballer at a club facing relegation: “You turn up for training. You try to uphold your standards. You pretty much know the manager will be leaving at the end of the season and you just do your best to keep going.”
He considered resigning several times. If he had quit, however, it would not have been over the Brexit battles consuming British politics and most of his attention. Instead, it would have been in protest against what he calls “a type of racism that festers and to which those who call themselves anti-racist are often the most blind”.
He is talking, of course, about antisemitism. Many of the left-wing activists who joined Labour in the Corbyn years were so hostile to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians that their views had metastasised into forms of prejudice against Jewish people that go back through the centuries and some of humanity’s darkest periods of history.
Like many MPs at that time, between the 2017 and 2019 elections, he remembers with a shudder people telling him they couldn’t vote Labour because they were Jewish. But he feels it more personally — and viscerally — because Vic’s family are Jewish too. Although his wife is no more religious than he is, they give a respectful nod to her roots by occasionally taking their children to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood near Lord’s cricket ground in London.
As the outcry over antisemitism in the party grew, so did Starmer’s sense of shame. “People I had got to know a bit at the synagogue would come up to me, asking, ‘What’s happened to your party? Why can’t you do something? Are you embarrassed to be a Labour MP?’ I would go home feeling angry,” he says.
Sir Keir Starmer served as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary, visiting EU headquarters in 2019 shortly before Britain’s departure
FRANK AUGSTEIN/AP
At times this became — almost — too much to bear. Chris Ward, his close aide at the time, remembers Starmer coming in one morning and saying he was going to have to resign because “he couldn’t defend this to his members, his family or his constituents; it was very difficult for him”. Asked why he didn’t resign from the shadow cabinet, Starmer says: “I did question myself the whole time about whether I should stay on or leave. But I thought, on balance, it’s better to fight it from the inside.”
Many of the MPs most vocal in denouncing Corbyn from the backbenches were privately urging him to remain in place as shadow Brexit secretary because the European issue was so crucial to them. Although there were occasions when Starmer voiced criticism publicly, most of it was in private. He recalls one particularly fiery meeting of the shadow cabinet in the summer of 2019 after the BBC Panorama documentary Is Labour Antisemitic? had aired. “Jeremy wouldn’t stick up for the staff who had blown the whistle,” he says, “and his office was putting out stuff disparaging them.”
Abbott, the former shadow home secretary, has since poured scorn on the notion that he challenged Corbyn over the issue at these meetings. “I was in Jeremy’s shadow cabinet alongside Starmer,” she said last year. “It is nonsense to say he was fighting privately.” But her recollection is sharply at odds with not only Starmer’s — he has said the rows on the issue went on for entire meetings of the shadow cabinet — but also that of several of her colleagues at those meetings.
Even one of Corbyn’s most senior advisers, someone who had little sympathy for Starmer but is known for making copious notes on what was being said, has confirmed the shadow Brexit secretary spoke out. “Keir was among several members of the shadow cabinet raising what was being said in the media about antisemitism,” says this aide.
Tom Watson, the party’s former deputy leader who repeatedly voiced his concern in public, was impressed by the way Starmer tackled the issue behind the scenes. “I remember this time when Keir sat opposite Jeremy and gave him the full barrister treatment. He stared straight at him and went very calmly through what was happening and what was wrong,” says Watson. “Jeremy could not meet his eyes — he’d look down and start playing around with his notes. It was a real moment.”
Starmer has nonetheless been criticised by those who refused to serve on Corbyn’s front bench or quit the party for not taking a stronger public stand. Ian Austin, an old ally of Watson who now sits as an independent member of the House of Lords, tweeted at the end of 2019 that he had heard “Keir Starmer is commenting on antisemitism”, adding: “I wouldn’t know. He blocked me for asking him to speak about it and Corbyn’s dreadful leadership some months ago. Amazing how these people have finally found some courage.”
Starmer was bound by the rule of collective responsibility under which members of the shadow cabinet are not supposed to attack the leadership or the party’s positions in public. Others, however, suggest his public loyalty owed less to this than to his previous profession, in which lawyers are still duty-bound to defend a client even if they suspect he is guilty. Charlie Falconer, who also served in the shadow cabinet during Corbyn’s leadership, said lawyers are not allowed to say “my client’s the most appalling f***wit”, but that should not be mistaken for Starmer “thinking that Corbyn was a good thing”.
Part three: The real Sue Gray
Sue Gray disliked being in the spotlight when she investigated the Downing Street parties
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
Sue Gray was once such a powerful figure in the Cabinet Office that she was described by a minister as the person who really “runs Britain”, without whom “things just don’t happen”. She was also, of course, the official who’d taken charge of the inquiry into Downing Street’s Covid parties that accelerated the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership.
Her arrival at the Labour Party had been delayed for several months until the autumn of 2023, while she went through the advisory committee on business appointments, but there was a strong push in government for a longer-than-usual waiting period, which felt more personal because of resentment among some senior civil servants as well as ministers over her accepting such a partisan job so soon after publication of this report.
Starmer, however, had shrugged off the controversy about his new chief of staff, emphasising he’d had no contact with Gray when she was investigating the parties. He had always wanted a civil servant for the post rather than a more political appointment to help him prepare a transition plan into government. But he was particularly keen on it being her “because I knew Sue’s reputation”. He says: “When all this nonsense blew up and some people were asking if I should still go ahead, I was willing to wait for her because of Sue’s obvious integrity, rather than her lack of it.”
For her part, Gray — who has not spoken publicly about this or anything else before — makes clear she disliked being under the public gaze. Some of the profiles of her at that time had reheated old allegations that, during a career break in the 1980s when she had briefly run a pub in Co Down, a short drive from the border with the Republic of Ireland, Gray had been working for British intelligence. When this is put to her directly, she bursts out laughing, then says: “I’m definitely not a spy — and no, I never have been.”
Martin Plaut 