Keir Starmer: Key revelations from the new biography of the Labour leader

An intimate new biography has shed light on Keir Starmer’s rise from working-class roots in Surrey to knocking on the door of No 10 as Labour leader.

The Tom Baldwin biography offers never-before-seen details into the lawyer turned politician’s formative years – including the “very tough life” of his beloved brother Nick, his frustration with Jeremy Corbyn, a brief dalliance with Trotskyism at Oxford, and his lifelong obsession with Arsenal football club.

Here The Independent recaps the key revelations from Keir Starmer: The Biography

Starmer’s mother struggled with illness most of her life, being diagnosed with Still’s disease at only ten-years-old. This is a rare inflammatory arthritis which caused her chronic difficulty. She was told she would be in a wheelchair by her twenties, and that it would be impossible to ever have children.

An experimental cortisone treatment helped her to beat the odds, and she went on to have four children. Starmer recounts how the children would often need to wait for her to catch up, or how she would sometimes fall over and be unable to get back up.

By her late-thirties, Starmer’s mother had to be admitted to hospital. Her medication “had made her skin tissue-paper thin and her bones crumbly like Weetabix – they stopped her body from healing itself,’ he says.

“Whenever I’m faced with a problem or a challenge,” he says, ‘I think of her and walk towards it”

“Some of the tougher things I have to do just pale into insignificance”.

From Starmer’s speeches, the public knows his father Rod was a toolmaker. However, Baldwin draws out more from the Labour leader on the subject – something he admits doesn’t come naturally.

“I didn’t really have arguments or confrontations with Dad,” Starmer says, “we just didn’t have that point of connection. There was space in him for Mum and not much else.”

He recounts how his father could be strict and severe, not allowing them to have a TV set for years – and restricting use of it when they eventually did.

“We weren’t allowed to watch the shows – Starsky & Hutch, Tiswas and the like – that other people were watching back then,” he says, “we couldn’t play pop music on the radio if Dad was there.”

Young Starmer was, however, able to negotiate a ‘weekly dose’ of Match of the Day on Saturday nights.

Starmer would later reflect on his relationship with his father in a Zoom call with Barack Obama, organised by David Lammy.

“When Keir started talking about his dad, he got quite emotional,” says Lammy, “and Barack just came alive.”

Keir Starmer is the middle child of four siblings: two sisters and a brother. His younger siblings, Katy and Nick are twins, while he has one older sister, Ana. They all grew up together, in a house of six, with their parents.

‘I shared a bunk bed with my brother in a room with an airing cupboard and just enough space for a couple of small desks where we’d do our homework,’ Starmer says.

His younger brother Nick has learning difficulties due to complications at birth. Starmer has spoken candidly for the first time about his relationship in the new biography: “We were a family of six, so it didn’t feel lonely and I shared a room with him, but Nick didn’t have many friends and got called ‘thick’ or ‘stupid’ by other kids.’

“Even now I try to avoid using words like that to describe anyone”.

Starmer joined the Oxford University Labour Club in his time at the university, at a time when hard left politics were popular on campus. There is one reference to him the Labour Club’s student newspaper: ‘I am not one to deny the existence of macho politics. Now just look at Keir – “I am not macho and this is not a Talking Heads jacket so just shut your bloody mouth – Starmer.”’

His university peer and still close friend Alex Harvey describes experiencing Starmer’s longstanding hard-work mentality on a holiday in France: “As soon as he arrived, Keir went off for a five-mile run in the searing heat, then staggered back when everyone else was sitting around.”

“It was like he had to almost destroy himself before he could chill out.”

When Keir Starmer first moved to London, he lived in a rundown flat in the north of the city. Starmer and his friends lived a low-cost bohemian lifestyle of cheap drinks, burning furniture to stay warm – and once finding a dead pigeon in the water tank.

“The flat was really grotty,” he says, “but it was cheap, you know I was with mates, we were young and having a good time”.

Below the flat operated a sauna and massage parlour, the landlord having been jailed the year prior for making money from prostitution.

In 2020, Starmer attended the same-sex wedding of his niece Jess in 2022. Six weeks later, they were subject to a homophobic attack.

“They were hand in hand like the newlyweds they are when three men came up to them,” Starmer says, “these cowards punched Jess many times, fracturing her cheekbone, for no reason except she’s a lesbian.”

Baldwin recounts Starmer’s “cold fury”, and how he threw his phone across a table to show the photos, displaying “emotion you rarely see in public”.

Earlier in his life, as a teenager, Starmer and his friends were beaten up in a nightclub after trying to defend a friend who was attacked for being gay.

“Graham didn’t do much to conceal that he was gay,” recalls Starmer, “and some of the local kids decided the way to prove they weren’t gay too was by punching and kicking him. Mark and I got involved, so all three of us ended up getting beaten up.”

Before meeting his wife Victoria, Starmer had a series of serious and long-term relationships.

‘Keir was always so driven by work and questioned whether he would be able to give children the time he knows they deserve,’ says friend John Murray.

‘Then, when Vicky came on the scene, I knew this was different.’

Their first interaction was far from love at first sight, however. Victoria was a solicitor and Starmer a senior barrister, and she had received a call from him asking to check if some court documents were accurate.

Several times he asked her if she was sure to the point where, as the phone call ended, Victoria asked her colleague: “who the f*** does he think he is?”

A few weeks later they met again – this time in person – at a legal dinner. Shortly after that came a first date.

Starmer’s fractious relationship with previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is now well-documented. However during Mr Corbyn’s tenure, it was a much more closely guarded secret.

Biographer Tom Baldwin suggests that allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party weighed heavy on the new leader’s mind. Starmer says he got to a point where he considered leaving regularly: “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.”

Starmer has made no secret of his love of football, known for playing five-a-side every Sunday in his constituency. This new biography addresses his passion in new detail. Starmer describes the feeling of watching a last-minute winning goal in a stadium:

“Everyone stands up, hands in the air,” he once said, “like there’s a magnet in the sky above the stadium.”

His school friend Mark Adams describes how genuine his love of the game is: “If most politicians try to invent a love of football to make themselves appear more normal, Keir probably needs to downplay the football side of things because he really is pretty obsessive about it all.”

Starmer’s first near-resignation came in April 2021, following Labour’s infamous ‘Beergate’ scandal. After revelations that he and Deputy Leader Angela Rayner may have attended an event in Durham that was in-breach of Covid-19 lockdown rules.

The Labour leader vowed to step down, eager to avoid charges of hypocrisy after slamming Boris Johnson for his ‘Partygate’ scandal. Starmer said to his wife: “No comebacks, no hanging around in Parliament like a bad smell – I’ll do something else with my life”.

The Labour leader and Rayner were subsequently cleared of wrongdoing by the police. However, this was only the first time Starmer has nearly walked.

The second came later that year, when Labour lost the May 2021 Hartlepool by-election under Starmer’s watch, the new leader experienced a major confidence crisis and considered resignation. ‘I felt like I had been kicked in the guts,’ Starmer says, ‘the result was terrible and I had a moment where I thought we are not going to be able to do this.’

Baldwin recounts how Starmer made many calls to his wife and even to his former legal colleagues at Doughty Street Chambers. Former workmate Ed Fitzgerald recalls saying they’d always welcome him back “if he was finding it all too tough”.

Nevertheless, Starmer remained – and has since gone on to gain seven seats at by-elections over the last few years.