Keir Starmer

The Labour leader was pictured drinking indoors during a by-election campaign in April 2021.

A spokesperson for the party told journalists ‘I think some of the characterisation of the letter has been inaccurate’ and called the occasion a ‘work event’. A spokesperson for Durham Constabulary said he had replied to the letter ‘as a courtesy’ and the force ‘will consider its contents before responding in due course’. ‘In light of that decision, and the tests applied by the Metropolitan Police for the level of a covid regulations breach, I believe there is a strong public interest in Durham Constabulary reviewing its decision not to investigate the Starmer incident further.’

A critical biography paints the Labour leader as ruthless. He should take the compliment | Britain.

Likewise, the idea that Sir Keir is a cynical mastermind is a more comforting one for Corbynites than the possibility that the former Labour leader was manifestly unsuited to the role. Standing on a Corbynite platform of higher taxes on the very rich and public ownership of utilities, Sir Keir sauntered to victory. The cynical explanation puts Sir Keir in a much less feeble light. “If you’re so good at politics, why are you not in power?” applies in Westminster. Sir Keir’s path of reluctant support of Mr Corbyn, to be ditched once in power, was an option open to all Labour’s pretenders from the right. Then, once in power, Sir Keir organised a ruthless purge of the left-wingers who had taken control of the party machinery. Mr Eagleton’s portrayal of Sir Keir as a blood-soaked Trot-slayer is rather useful. Sir Keir changed tack in a bid to stay alive. FOR A MAN who could be prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer enjoys a peculiar reputation as a political naïf. The Labour leader was elected as an MP only in 2015, after a decorated career as a human-rights barrister and a stint as the director of public prosecutions. One unflattering theory for his flexible political positions is that he has been “cuckooed”. Cuckooing happens when wrong ’uns take over the flat of a vulnerable person, turning it into a drug den or a brothel. In Mr Eagleton’s telling, however, Sir Keir was a wrecker. In “The Starmer Project”, the political naïf turns into a bequiffed Machiavelli. On this telling, Sir Keir undermined Jeremy Corbyn, his hard-left predecessor, as part of a long-term plan to install himself as Labour leader. To his critics, he has the air of a hobbyist who had reached the top of one profession and fancied a go at another, and who ended up as a potential prime minister due to circumstance rather than skill.

Who is Keir Starmer? A passionate Remainer who whipped Boris Johnson's Brexit deal through parliament. The unity Labour leadership candidate who has waged ...

It acceded to “a customs union”, which Starmer used on television appearances to conflate with “the customs union”. It yielded to a “people’s vote” to resolve parliamentary deadlock, which Starmer then claimed in his 2018 conference speech could be used to overturn the original referendum result. He didn’t, because it would split Labour and the unions and leave him susceptible to a coup. It allowed Keir Starmer, an ambitious centrist with an authoritarian streak, to build his leadership principally on the strength of having served under Corbyn and passionately advocated Remain, and to crush those incipient hopes and restore the establishment to power. As with Starmer and Burnham’s “immigration listening tour” in 2016, the exercise seems designed to lead to right-wing conclusions. Starmer ditched Remain, and most of his promises to Labour members, almost as soon as he took the leadership. Eagleton faults the “conformist” left for weakening Corbyn’s position and is particularly critical of McDonnell for panicking in the face of difficulty, such as the dire European election results in 2019, which led him to urge Corbyn to compromise with the right. Instead, Labour scored hollow parliamentary victories against May. With each win, McCluskey mourns, as Labour became increasingly associated with the project to thwart Brexit,“a part of their support base was lost and Corbyn’s credentials as an insurgent leader were shredded”. Even after the failed “chicken coup” in 2016, when MPs tried to oust Corbyn without a leadership contest, and Owen Smith’s disastrous leadership bid, which Starmer supported, the leadership wanted heavyweights in the shadow cabinet. Forging a close relationship with Barack Obama’s attorney-general Eric Holder, he aligned the CPS with US foreign policy and pledged to seal the extradition of the autistic hacker Gary McKinnon to the US, and reacted with “fury”, according to Eagleton, at Theresa May’s decision in 2012 to block the extradition because it violated McKinnon’s human rights. When he trained as a lawyer in the late 1980s, he joined the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. But, as his politics became more social-democratic, his colleagues say he sought to “NGOify” the organisation and remove the word “socialist” from its name. But in dealing with the Conservatives, Eagleton writes, he “prefigured his Labour leadership” style in his effort at “constructive engagement” – even over such controversial matters as the “Snoopers’ Charter” bill extending state surveillance over people’s data. The human rights lawyer who outflanks Amnesty International to the right on such issues as trans rights, the “spy cops” bill, and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.