‘Boring’ Starmer seeks to heal wounded Labour party

Keir Starmer is the frontrunner to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party, but even his own fans admit he is dull.

“Keir is boring. He is very boring. That’s why I like him,” says one Labour MP who has endorsed him.

Labour has just crashed to its worst electoral defeat in 80 years and the future of one of Britain’s biggest parties is at stake.

After four years of civil war between the party’s two wings — moderate centrists and radical “Corbynistas” — many on both sides want a figure who can unite the party, or at least end the outright hostilities.

Mr Corbyn announced he would stand down as Labour leader the day after Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won an 80-seat majority on December 12.

Since the contest started on January 6, the field of six has been halved: Sir Keir now faces two female MPs for the crown, Lisa Nandy and Corbyn ally Rebecca Long Bailey. The results of the ballot, which opened on Monday and will be decided by more than 500,000 party members, will be announced on April 4.

Supporters of Sir Keir, a barrister who served as director of public prosecutions — head of the Crown Prosecution Service — between 2008 and 2013, say he is a “grown-up” who inspires loyalty from those who work for him.

While he served for several years under Mr Corbyn — making him more palatable to party hardliners — he is also acceptable to more moderate MPs in the Parliamentary Labour party.

“He knows that the factionalism in the party needs to stop. We need to get away from the idea of purges,” said Jenny Chapman, the former MP for Darlington who is running his campaign.

And yet, despite winning more MP endorsements and nominations from local Labour parties, there are still lingering concerns over his sometimes wooden performances. The fact that he is a man — Labour has never had a female leader — and the fact that he was a prominent Remainer who led the party into backing a second referendum on Brexit may also count against him.

Yet Stephen Doughty, MP for Cardiff South, argues that the country will in time move on from its bitter Brexit divisions: “There are white working-class Brexit-voting people in my constituency who support Keir. It may sound counter-intuitive but they back him because they see him as someone who would have credibility as a Labour prime minister.”

By pitching himself as a political chameleon somewhere between the radicalism of Mr Corbyn and the centrism of Tony Blair’s New Labour governments, Sir Keir not only hopes to reunite the UK’s opposition but provide a check on Boris Johnson’s Tory government.

Tulip Siddiq, one of his friends in the PLP, said: “He will get Johnson on detail: he is forensic in terms of understanding every aspect of all legislation.”

To try to endear him to younger Corbynistas, some of Sir Keir’s campaign videos have played up his work as a young lawyer, defending dockers, print workers, miners, and poll tax protesters.

Former colleagues remember him as a well-regarded, fair DPP with a formidable work ethic. During the 2011 riots, many criminal courts sat through the night to prosecute hundreds of rioters: “I remember I went to court in Highbury and Islington overnight and Keir came in at 5am to see how we were getting on,” recalled Alison Saunders, who succeeded him as DPP and is now a partner at Linklaters.

His time at the CPS has, however, also attracted criticism from leftwing opponents who cite decisions during his tenure including the original decision not to prosecute a policeman in connection with the death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson during the 2009 G20 protests in London.

Sir Keir later shifted his position, charging PC Simon Harwood with manslaughter, although the policeman was eventually acquitted. The Labour leadership contender subsequently described it as his most difficult case while DPP.

Despite growing up in the affluent Surrey town of Oxted, and attending Reigate Grammar School, which became a fee-paying independent school while he was there, he has also been playing up his working-class credentials.

His father Rod was a toolfitter, his mother Jo a nurse who suffered from Still’s disease, and their unusual hobby was rescuing donkeys.

After studying law at Leeds university and then at Oxford he flirted with radicalism as part of the “editorial collective” for Socialist Alternatives, a fringe magazine with pro-European quasi-Trotskyite views that vowed to challenge the “capitalist order”.

His first ever interview was with Tony Benn, where he asked for the older leftwinger’s advice on how to turn Labour into “the united party of the oppressed”.

By the time Sir Keir decided to go into frontline politics in 2013 the Labour party was still pursuing a fairly centrist course under Ed Miliband.

Elected as MP for the north London constituency of Holborn & St Pancras two years later, he found himself outside Mr Corbyn’s clique of “hard-left” figures, despite what he called his “searing sense . . . things need to change profoundly”.

In fact he was among more than 60 shadow ministers — he was home affairs spokesman at the time — who resigned in a coup in mid-2016, angering members of Mr Corbyn’s inner circle.

“He actually has zero politics, which means he often follows the crowd,” says one aide to the outgoing leader.

When Mr Corbyn saw off a leadership challenge later that year, Sir Keir was one of the first to offer to return to the front bench, becoming shadow Brexit secretary.

The role suited his attention to detail, and as the Brexit war raged he deployed obscure parliamentary devices to confound the Tory government — while shifting Labour into an increasingly Remain position.

Some colleagues fear this lawyerly approach could make him flat-footed when rapid decisions are needed. Few believed Sir Keir when he told a Mumsnet Q&A this month that he often leapt to conclusions too quickly.

“Keir’s legalistic scalpel is his greatest strength and his greatest weakness,” said one colleague.