‘You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself’: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet

What about a quick-fire round, I say to Keir Starmer, who is pushed for time on the campaign trail, a few snapshots to help glimpse the man likely to be PM? Starmer is nodding. He’s keen to be helpful, keen to be a sport, although a little unsure of this magazine profile business and the need to talk about feelings. We are in the green room, all mirrors and concrete, backstage at Labour’s Scottish launch in Inverclyde, and unless I’m mistaken he still has on a layer of foundation. Ready? He folds his arms across his chest. “Yes, by all means.”

But then he can’t really say if he’s strictly an optimist or a pessimist and, no, doesn’t know if he’s an extrovert or an introvert, either. “I’ve never really thought about it. I don’t know what that tells you.” He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night – or ever: “I don’t dream.” Just hits the pillow at 11 and – “bang” – is out till around 5. He doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, wasn’t scared of anything as a child. “Nothing. No phobias.” Hmmm, this is harder than I thought. What about his lovely heather-coloured tie, where is it from and who chose it? He takes it between finger and thumb. “Would you say heather? I had it down as slightly darker.” Quick-fire is perhaps not his format.

He will be more relaxed and expansive in our second interview a week later when, sun-glazed from the Normandy beach, he will tell me about the D-day commemorations where he stayed the whole day and Rishi Sunak did not. Like Gordon Brown’s mutter of “bigoted woman”, Theresa May’s dementia tax, Richard Nixon’s sweaty top lip, the D-day debacle will mark a shift in the campaign. Starmer will lean back on his office sofa, put his hands behind his head and reveal his shirt underarms – impressively dry for a Friday of meltdown news. He will say he’s thought about my questions and has something to tell me (of which more later).

But a week is an eternity in politics and so today, in the green room in Scotland, he’s still too cautious of tripwire headlines. Who can blame him? At 20 points ahead with a hostile media, he has everything to lose. So, as the Tories crater in the polls, he tiptoes around the question of Downing Street, caveats any mention with “if we get that far”; “we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves”.

In the weeks that I tail Starmer – beginning in April, ending in June – I observe him give speeches, meet voters, work sleeves rolled up on the train. I see him make strong use of those frown lines, I see him chuckle, drop the F-bomb, crack jokes about Ed Balls. His suits get sharper; he acquires new specs; more clay is swept through the concrete hair. I notice that when he’s cross, his ears redden. Stressed, he has a face like a slammed front door. The snap election explodes plans for me to accompany him to his favourite tandoori, to witness the blow as Arsenal finish the season as runners-up. Winning is everything for Starmer, those close to him say. In football, in life, in politics.

And unless the nation has colluded in one giant lie to opinion pollsters, Labour is set to take power with a majority so zinging, it will eclipse even Blair’s. A victory so epic that Tories are now begging voters not to deliver what Grant Shapps calls a “supermajority” and install what the Daily Mail fear is a “one-party socialist state”.

What’s odd, then, is that Starmer’s personal ratings look good only next to lame duck Sunak’s. An Ipsos poll shows 49% of voters don’t know what he stands for. On stage, on TV, he does little to help them. He shrugs off backing Jeremy Corbyn, saying he never thought his predecessor could win. At Labour’s manifesto launch, he declared, “If you take nothing else away from today, let it be this. We are pro-business and pro-worker, the party of wealth creation.” Income taxes won’t go up, he’ll be the private sector’s best friend. A stance to garner support, sure, but complicated if you’re trying to tell a story about him; to plot the narrative arc of the last five years.

“I am who I am, I know what I am,” he has said, rejecting comparisons with former leaders. To me, he adds, “Everyone asks whose name I have tattooed on me and the answer is none of them.” (He has tattoos? “Er, no, I haven’t. Maybe I should.”) Who he is on paper is easy enough: a barrister who specialised in human rights law, king’s counsel, former director of public prosecutions (for which he earned a knighthood). “Some people will say you are boring and stiff,” journalist Beth Rigby, who has more guts than I do, told him on the Sky News debate. “Cheers,” he laughed in unflustered response, because if there’s one thing Starmer is not afraid of, it’s letting his inner Clement Attlee shine through. I’ve heard people push the thesis of why boring is good, much needed in this post-truth, post-Johnson, deeply unserious apocalyptic bin-fire period of British political history. Boring is a cool drink after a 100-mile crawl through the desert in a heatwave. Boring is the gold standard when selfless political service, civility and honesty have faced an extinction-level event in Britain.

* * *

Which brings me to Labour HQ in Southwark on a sticky London afternoon a week later. I’m led past a ticking countdown clock – “Polls open in *26* days” – past the hive of hot desks and happy workers in white trainers and open-neck shirts, who would surely be ID-ed in the pub. Past the lush foliage and surprising number of union flags and delivered to Starmer’s office, where two mugs of tea are set down on the table. He’s in one of his identical Charles Tyrwhitt suits, another of his identical shirts. “You asked me questions that I’ve never asked myself,” he says of the last time we met. “That may seem funny, [but] part of being Keir” – he sometimes talks about himself in the third person – “is just ploughing on. Knowing what I’m doing, knowing where I’ve got to go, without allowing myself time to stop and have a discussion with myself. I’ve just got this thing about keeping going.”

I say, because on his face was a genuine expression of bemusement when I asked about his emotional inner life, that I’m guessing he never did therapy. “No, no,” he says. “No.” Then “No” again in a lower tone bordering on horror. He’s not saying this is the only way to live, it’s just that “I am self-aware enough not to go into side alleys to have a chat with myself about these things.”

I ask what he gleans from all the political biography he reads, and he says thoughts “about leadership”. Good leadership means consulting with his team, even when he thinks he knows best, and good leadership means the team feel comfortable rebutting his view. “Steph, Tom” – he gestures to his advisers sitting quietly in the room – “can agree or disagree. I’ve said to the staff here many times, and this really matters to me: I want respect, but I don’t want deference.” Deference is massive failure of leadership, he argues, “where you create the conditions in which other people don’t feel that they can challenge you. The best decisions I’ve made in my life were those held up to the light and that survived scrutiny. The worst were when nobody said ‘boo’.”

Certainly, there’s no danger of deference when he hangs up his jacket at his redbrick in Kentish Town. Here, there’s no shadow cabinet, no advisers, just the three members of his family – his wife, Victoria, their teenage son and daughter. He supplies a typical example of how they respond to his role: when he came back named the Spectator’s politician of the year in 2022, he sat on the sofa and passed the award to his son. “He didn’t even look up from the telly. He took it, said, ‘How did you blag that, then?’ and passed it back.

“So it’s not a case of walking through the door and minutes of blissful, ‘Oh, how was your day?’ or, ‘Recount the brilliant things that happened today.’ It’s straight into a row [about the takeaway], one of them wants a pizza, one wants something else. And then there’s an argument about what we had last week, and whose decision we went with.” He’s laughing as he describes the negotiation skills required to oversee this. Calm is restored by the sitcom Friday Night Dinner, which he likes, though “it’s pretty formulaic”. It gives him joy, he says, to sit down together. “Some of the humour is a bit close to the bone – they are only 13 and 15 – and they’ll say, ‘Did they just say that?’”

He’s coy about home life, perhaps a little guilty. So desperate is he to protect his kids, he won’t say their names aloud – just “my boy” and “my girl”. This gives them the freedom to walk around locally, hang with friends, get up to “all sorts” (including rite of passage teenage behaviour) “without fanfare or attention”. He says it’s “difficult” at times. Children’s shoes were placed by protesters in his front garden to symbolise the high death toll in Gaza. Even simple things: looking out of their windows, they see journalists in the street. “That affects them. I am acutely aware.” He says it would be different if they were older or much younger, but “these are formative years. We keep life as ordinary and unchanged as possible.”

Has he broached how their lives will change should they win. “A bit. We believe in crossing every bridge as we get to it and therefore having great long conversations about the change, Vic and I decided that isn’t [the best way].” He has taken “bits” of advice from Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, “but every child is going to experience it differently. And if a member of their families didn’t like it, I don’t want to relay that on to my kids. Our approach is to make it [as smooth as possible]. If we get that far.”

* * *

Right now, the priority at home is his son’s GCSEs. Starmer tries not to add to this tension with his anxieties about the election. “It’s hard, if I’m honest. When there’s a lot going on, I’m still in the zone. Sometimes I’m sort of half out of the conversation, which they notice straight away. They’ll say, ‘You’re not really listening, are you, Dad?’ Our boy says, ‘What did I just say?’” He lights up talking about the joy he feels when his son calls to say an exam went well. “That’s like – ” he does a little fist pump. “That’s a proud moment [when] he thinks he’s done his best.” Then he worries he’s talked too much about his son and his daughter will be cross. Each “thinks the other is the favourite”.

Of course, the story about Starmer’s father Rodney “the toolmaker” and his “no frills” parenting has been rehearsed. The repeated details about his childhood in a pebbledash semi in Oxted seemed like a forced effort to give his political story shape. But it is the root of his emotional clumsiness, Starmer insists. “The emotional space was quite limited at home … and therefore wasn’t something I was familiar with growing up.” He pauses, frowns, then corrects himself because actually, “my sister says she does express herself and her emotions more than I do. And so partly it must have been that emotional space, but partly it’s me. How I reacted to it.”

By contrast his mother Jo was boundless warmth, despite crippling Still’s disease, a rare type of inflammatory arthritis. An abiding memory is returning from school to find her making jam sandwiches and listening to Jim Reeves. He could confide in her about anything – “relationships and splitting up, all that stuff, which is so acute when you’re younger. She was wise counsel.” There are flashes of both parents in him, visible at different times in the debates, but perhaps most stark when an audience member called him “a political robot” and he froze, appearing not to know whether to stay shut down or to open up.

Jo’s illness – she was frequently rushed to ICU – meant the usual fits of adolescent rebellion were off-limits to the four Starmer children. He gives this as one example: their annual holiday was to a remote cottage in the Lake District, the one place that their mother really loved. “There wasn’t space for us to say, ‘Hang on, what about going to the seaside?’” Actually, there wasn’t much physical space at home, either. Starmer shared bunk beds with his brother Nick in a cramped bedroom until he went to university aged 18 – by which time, he adds, the fun of bunk beds had long “worn off”. He stands to mark out how small it was, as if pacing round a cell. He also shows me an approximation of the limited surface area for his posters of Debbie Harry and pages from the football magazine Shoot!. But it wasn’t all bad: he and his three siblings each had a dog. So he rose at 5.45am on weekdays both to walk his red setter Percy and to practise his flute.

Later, when he is in full flow about how “it was lovely to have a dog”, he halts, suddenly. “But you mustn’t put this in,” he says. “Because my daughter has launched a campaign to get a dog, so I’d better not wax lyrical about [it]. I can just see this being quoted back.”

His first memory, aged four, was his dad bringing home a blue Ford Cortina. “We’d never had a car. I spent my whole time cleaning it as it sat [on the drive] outside our house.” I suspect he was the family’s golden child – his siblings nicknamed him “Superboy” – but he rejects this outright. “I wasn’t the favourite because my mum was quite careful with that. But I did feel slightly separated because the other three went to the comprehensive school and I went to [Reigate] grammar school and the Guildhall School of Music on Saturdays.” One outlet was sport: football three times a week, athletics, rugby, cross-country. “We had a big field behind our house where we would go and play, build camps and things. There was freedom, I suppose, and that was great.” (Here, he shoehorns in a political message: “You know, because I live in Kentish Town, people don’t appreciate how rural my upbringing was. But I’ve a lifelong love of countryside.”)

It was on the top deck of the bus to school that frustrations were aired and arguments came to blows. He is named after the founder of the Labour party and told Desert Island Discs, “You can think for yourself of all the things that rhyme with Keir.” One school friend told his biographer, Tom Baldwin, that young Starmer was “rough and ready. Quite macho … a bit of a wild man without any of that lawyerly restraint you see today.” I ask when he last physically lashed out at someone. “On a football pitch,” he says instantly, “a few years ago.” Football has always been his hiding place from the world. When he steps on the pitch, there’s nothing else on his mind. “I can’t be thinking about work. All I’m thinking about is football. Totally all in. That is a release. That’s why I still really enjoy playing.” It’s the only place he feels frustrated about the ageing process. “But also,” he says with emphasis, “I am still on the pitch.” Not bad for 61. He says whenever he describes his position – a box-to-box midfielder – “the guys I play football with text me and say, maybe 20 years ago, mate.”

* * *

I am not sure how much his image has changed since it was moulded at Leeds university. He says he rocked up there in a woolly jumper with Ray Clemence hair, “Boomtown Rats under one arm, Status Quo under the other”. John Murray, his lifelong friend since, saw him striding across campus and thought, “‘There’s work to be done on this guy.’ [He] stripped me down, got my hair cut, got me into independent music and turned me into a certainly more hip 18- or 19-year-old than I was when I arrived.” There are still hints of that white working-class lad. Besides the Max Headroom hair (which has its own Instagram), he uses terms like “naff”, “cheers”, “mate”. His music tastes are lodged in the mid-80s – Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Edwyn Collins – and for a long while it seemed he couldn’t be photographed without a beer.

He had hoped to study politics at Leeds, but his parents insisted on law (he went on to do a postgrad at Oxford). Arguably, it was procedure and law that gave him the enthusiasm for details that is on display right now as he starts sketching a diagram of a two-way street in Hull in the 90s in answer to the question: have you ever got a parking ticket? “So, if you’re like this, you’re driving up that way or this way, you’re supposed to park facing that way … ” He hasn’t had a speeding ticket since he started working as an adviser to the newly established police board in Northern Ireland. “It occurred to me that picking up tickets for breaking driving laws wasn’t a good idea,” he says, adding, “I’m not trying to be goody two-shoes.” It is this extreme caution, I feel, that made Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones – whose fictional Mr Darcy was supposed to be based on Starmer – cry out, “Come on, Keir, loosen your tie, ruffle your hair.” It’s also why the story of how a conman called Paul Bint, who stole his identity to answer lonely hearts ads, is extra funny. Bint conducted two long-term affairs as “Keir Starmer, DPP” even stealing jewellery from one girlfriend to give to the other. When it came to court, one of the women said she was surprised his behaviour “wasn’t very DPP-like”.

In the life of the real Keir Starmer, there are many meaningful acts of a person who has willingly devoted himself to public service. He worked pro bono to advise two penniless climate activists sued by McDonald’s for handing out leaflets outside their restaurants, which became the famous McLibel case. “I didn’t know I was embarking on a 10-year exercise with them. I thought it was chilling for freedom of expression. But [advising] these two individuals against a giant corporation in this David and Goliath battle was an incredible experience. Very important.” He also acted for the miners’ unions, in relation to both pit closures and injury called vibration white finger (from mining tools). For a long time it was not properly diagnosed, leaving thousands without compensation until “we gathered all the experts together in a massive case and won it”. (More than £500m has since been paid out to those with the condition.)

He represented prisoners on death row in Jamaica, where the loss of hope was palpable, where there was no light, no toilet, where the people he sat down with in suffocating heat were certain they were about to die. “These are experiences that are legal, but they’re also human,” he says. “Some of the remand cells were like 20 people in a cell the size of this room. And everybody’s sleeping on the floor on top of each other. The toilet is a bucket with [only] a lid to stop it being completely offensive. How did I feel in there? Revolted. Angry.”

He says he copes with stress “by being practical, by doing things” – ploughing on, in other words. For the record, his belated response to my earlier question is that he is an optimist, but only in the “nuts-and-bolts sense” of wanting to change things for the better. And, thinking about it, he’s “a bit of both” on the extrovert/introvert scale.

* * *

Starmer had a number of long relationships before he met Victoria Alexander. She was a solicitor, he the senior barrister checking documents she’d sent over were accurate. “This schedule, is it any good? Is it absolutely accurate?” he barked down the phone. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” he heard her say as she hung up. They met again at a work dinner, and for their first date he asked her to go to the pub with him in Camden Town. Apparently his son has said this is the least romantic location imaginable, but Victoria said, “At least he walked me to the bus stop afterwards.” He spontaneously proposed in Greece just months later. “Won’t we need a ring, Keir?” she responded. For once he wasn’t prepared.

I’m told by one of her friends that Victoria is very funny but refuses to be “a show pony” so won’t give interviews or pose for a shoot. She grew up in north London, the daughter of Bernard, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Barbara, who converted to Judaism. When I suggest that makes Victoria Jewish, and his children, too, Starmer demurs. “No, no, they’re not Jewish for reasons I won’t bore you with. Bernard’s dad’s family didn’t accept that. So it – ” he waves a hand to suggest it’s not up for discussion. The family occasionally attend a liberal synagogue. “Pretty much every week” there’s a challah and they say kiddush with Bernard, or sometimes with Victoria’s sister on Zoom. Their Jewish heritage is important, he says. “And we’re very keen for the children to know about it, to understand it. Half of the family are Jewish, they’re either here or in Israel.” No one was directly affected by 7 October. “Thank God,” he says. But they’ve been affected by the war. “No doubt about that.”

I ask, because Victoria works in occupational health in the NHS, what she says by way of complaint when she comes home frayed after a day in the broken system? “There is a lot of frustration that nothing’s working and it takes for ever to get anything done. It’s like wading through syrup or glue. They’ve a spirit in her team – probably across all the NHS – of ‘Don’t complain, just get on with it’, while knowing it’s not what it should be.”

In the first televised debate, he insisted that he would never go private. Never, ever I push him now, in no circumstances? “What was put to me is: if you’re on the waiting list, would you? The answer is no. I had a meniscus done so I’ve been on that waiting list myself. It took months. And meant that I couldn’t play football. So there was a serious issue for Keir Starmer” – that third person again – “but it didn’t occur to me for a minute to jump the queue. I waited my turn. I don’t find that odd. I was then asked: what about an acute [situation]? Well, I’d go to the NHS. If there is one place to go to if you are in a life-threatening situation, it is the NHS. The private hospitals refer to the NHS. For all the faults, all the stresses and strains described in Vic’s world, when it comes to acute crisis, they are fantastic.”

* * *

On the subject of the debates, I ask about his accusation that Sunak was a “liar” (for saying a Labour government would increase the tax burden on each household by £2,000). Would he have used that word in politics before Boris Johnson was PM? “No. I’m not in the business of bandying insults around. But it was depressing when you’re trying to have a national debate about the issues of the day. You can argue robustly about a policy difference, but you can’t debate if the basis is actually a lie.” So why did he not push back more quickly? He says he wishes someone would get the tape, because at least that would give him some satisfaction of being able to show that he did say to Julie Etchingham that he wanted to come back on that point. “But she said, ‘No. We’ll come back to this later.’ I had a decision: do I shout over her? Or address it later? So I waited. And we didn’t come back to it till later on. I knew straight away I had to rebut it, and I tried to.”

I ask how he felt about Johnson insulting him in the Commons, resorting to name-calling (“human bollard” or “Sir Beer Korma”). “I couldn’t care less what he called me. I’m not saying I have great insight, but I felt his character would bring him down. I thought, there’s a guy who is detached from the truth. Whether he’s lying or not, it doesn’t matter to him.” Starmer lays out the specific and intentional way he set a trap for Johnson. “When I first asked him, ‘Did you apply all the rules?’ I hadn’t seen the video of Allegra [Stratton, Johnson’s director of strategic communications]. But he was told about her laughing in response to being asked, ‘What do we say about the parties?’ So I said [to my team], ‘I think there’s something here. Let’s get him on record. Because his instinct will be to lie.’ It was a thread that we pulled over months. I was less bothered by what he was saying to me than trying to be forensic and getting him on the record. It paid dividends in the end. He had to leave parliament – because he’d lied.”

I can’t think of a more explicit example of his foresight and ruthlessness. Is he more ruthless than Blair? “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never thought about it.” (I ask the same of a senior Labour insider who replies simply, “Yes.”) Perhaps Johnson should have been put on warning when Starmer suspended Jeremy Corbyn. He might also have observed how Starmer took total control of Labour’s ruling NEC and purged possible opponents on the hard left. Lately the NEC has remade the election candidates list in his image and dumped firebrands such as Faiza Shaheen.

* * *

Because it’s fresh the day I see him, Starmer wants to talk about D-day. He wants to tell me that he walked down to the beach and tried to contemplate the horror experienced by these young soldiers, not much older than his children. And, yes, he was upset by the “insult” to veterans. But it’s also Sunak’s big political choice that offends him.

“[It] was the birth of the postwar European institutions that said, ‘We’ve won this together, we need to stick together.’ Sunak can’t honour the Brits, then bugger off. It’s much deeper than just a judgment error. This said something about turning inwards, the sense that it doesn’t matter what you do on the international stage any more.”

I remind him that on the stage at the Hay festival in 2019, he said of Brexit, “My big, big fear was that we might turn in on ourselves and become a country that didn’t any more want to play our part on the international stage, didn’t think international obligations and standards mattered any more.” He laughs. “Blimey, I was ahead of myself. Therein lies the story of the last five years. That’s why the election has to be a reset. If we win it,” he says. “No vote has been cast!”

I ask whether the family will live in No 10 in the traditional way. “To go back to the kids,” he says, “we had a discussion when they were born. How did we want to bring them up? And we settled on ‘happy and confident’. And that’s always what we’re asking ourselves: are they happy? Are they confident? So we’re not pushing them to do things because we’ve got a set route for them. We want them to be happy and confident, and obviously to do as well as they possibly can. We’re not the parents who are driving them to do this, or exposing them. Wherever we will live, we’ll live together as family, of course. And that will be Downing Street if we” – touch wood – “get it over the line. But Vic and I are very much taking things as they come.”