I’d been looking forward to this. Whatever your political position, Keir Starmer is an interesting character: within 25 years he went from the radical left (or at least radical-left-adjacent) to accepting appointments as a QC, a knight, and the Director of Public Prosecutions. There must be a lesson here, but it’s never been clear to me whether Starmer is a cautionary tale about the scale and pace at which people’s politics can change, or whether we ought to beware of ambitious young professionals who use the left as a veneer or a springboard for their careers.
In The Starmer Project, Oliver Eagleton argues that people are wrong to see Starmer as an ideology-free political novice. Instead, as leader, Starmer has used his significant bureaucratic skill to ‘modernise’ the Labour Party by cleansing it of the vestiges of socialism in general, and of Jeremy Corbyn in particular.
It’s really an essay — a political intervention — rather than a straight biography. And there’s nothing wrong with that, although the author’s impressive level of access to key Corbyn-era figures and his enthusiasm for the central set-pieces of his argument (Corbyn’s suspension, the forever-war over Brexit policy) contrasts with the more desktop-style research behind the earlier parts of the book.
Eagleton finds the roots of Starmer’s actions as Labour leader in his recent professional past. As shadow Brexit secretary he acted as a sort-of autoimmune disease, which drove the various groupings within the party to attack each other. As DPP he was a skilled political operative with reactionary instincts. At one point he found himself outflanked on the left by — of all people — Home Secretary Theresa May and London mayor Boris Johnson over the Gary McKinnon case. Starmer, Eagleton argues, brought a great deal of experience and ideology to his current role.
I don’t criticise Eagleton’s main argument that Starmer did genuinely have his own political convictions long before he came leader. The book cites early examples to show, for example, that Starmer is process-driven, Atlantacist, anti-protestor, deeply pro-police, and not overly-concerned about the persecution of GRT communities. We’re given the sense that the left is a part of his past, which he’d excised as part of his political progress, and that he is trying to repeat that process on the scale of the Labour Party as a whole. But I’d hoped to find out more about how this standpoint developed.
By far the most interesting thing about Starmer is not the transition from top prosecutor to anti-left Labour leader, but the transition from soi-disant socialist during The End Of History to top prosecutor. How did the 23-year-old who wrote provocative, precocious articles about the police in obscure left-wing journals end up falling in love with the Police Service of Northern Ireland? The PSNI isn’t just any old constabulary: as Eagleton points out, while Starmer was responsible for its oversight, Sinn Fein was refusing to engage with a quasi-occupational force.
Eagleton’s analysis is that an ‘emphasis on legislative fixes supplant[ed] the short-lived dalliance with street-level activism’, but ‘how?’ is the important question. We know that Starmer outgrew his critique of the police long ago, and he must have been inwardly laughing at us when he was photographed taking the knee with Angela Rayner during the Black Lives Matter protests. With the zeal of the convert, he probably saw all of this as another embarrassing dreg of left-wing politics that would soon be modernised away. Starmer is a counter-current to the criticisms of policing that have swelled along with Black Lives Matter, so his political development is worth thinking about.
This, for me, is the key weakness of the book: it’s not an origin story, and it misses some of the more incredible features of Starmer’s life. The best example of this is the Spycops scandal, which is a remarkable bridge between his political beginnings and the high-level professionalism that characterises him now.
Eagleton quite rightly criticises Starmer’s failures in respect of Spycops both as DPP and as Labour leader. He commissioned a whitewash report into the possibility of Spycops-tainted convictions at the CPS, and whipped MPs to abstain at all three readings of the Covert Human Informant Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. But, as Rob Evans and Paul Lewis point out in their 2014 book Undercover, while Starmer was helping Helen Steel and Dave Morris with the ‘McLibel’ litigation brought by McDonalds, his legal advice was being passed back to the police spy John Dines (who had deceived Steel into a relationship). Evans and Lewis think it ‘highly probable’ that the ‘confidential legal strategy the activists were receiving from Starmer […] was passed on to McDonalds’.
This is an outrage by anyone’s standards, and it’s hard to imagine how a lawyer would react to their legally privileged advice being shared with both the state and the opposing side. The extraordinary thing is that Starmer was, in a certain sense, a personal victim of the Spycops scandal. There are bound to be Home Office reports with his name in them.
How did Starmer react? It’s not clear when he found out about the scale of Spycops, or his connection to it, and it was 10 months after he stepped down as DPP that the CPS decided not to prosecute four of the officers who had formed relationships with women (it is unknown whether Starmer’s spy, Dines, was among them). But he must have known about it during the passage of the CHIS Bill last year, which introduced legal immunities for covert operatives. Starmer was so passionately unopposed to the Bill that he picked a fight with the PLP over whipping them to abstain (suffering a number of resignations), and ensured the defeat of Shami Chakrabarti’s House of Lords amendment, which tried to to prevent impunity for undercover agents. I’ve struggled to understand this, and the book left me wondering still.
From a lawyer’s perspective, I had to admire Starmer’s anti-hierarchical beginnings in such a rigid profession. He was a founder member of Doughty Street Chambers at just two years’ call. He was writing silly, confident pieces in this magazine and elsewhere at a time when many would have seen him as an inexperienced upstart. He seems to have shown a disdain for keeping his head down and gently building a legal practice.
It’s clear that he was incredibly busy in the Haldane Society, both as its secretary and as an editor of Socialist Lawyer. He joined the editorial committee before the second issue had come out in Spring 1987. As I understand it, 20 years later Starmer was on the point of being made an honorary vice-president of the Haldane Society — a position he’d accepted — before his appointment as DPP became public in 2008. He had to resign his membership altogether, the vice-presidency was never announced, and 13 years later the society permanently banned him from re-joining.
Eagleton gives Starmer a great deal of credit as a fleet-footed bureaucrat. As a political operative he comes out of the book looking more effective than McDonnell, Corbyn, and most of the Labour establishment. But, as Eagleton recognises, there is a difference between running a discrete policy agenda and leading a whole political party, let alone a movement, and Starmer has seriously struggled with the larger role. In that respect, Starmer seems to performed a very valuable function here: he has undermined the assumption that barristers are somehow inherently competent. As leader, Starmer’s political instincts are so bad, and his strategy of supporting the government but challenging its processes have been so ineffective, that he’s been very useful at challenging the sense of deference which is often, wrongly, given to the legal profession (Eagleton points out that there were calls for Starmer to stand for leader less than a week after he became an MP).
While Starmer has held little sway over the electorate, the book shows that he has a very firm grasp on the party itself. He’s brought it with him on the journey to the right. At the membership level he has pursued ideological purity by expelling socialists and driving them away. At the PLP level he has, fairly impressively, overseen a collapse of the Socialist Campaign Group. Having made it his mission to exclude Corbyn, and demonstrated his seriousness about excluding the wider left, the SCG MPs seem cowed by the erratic-but-strident way in which Starmer makes his managerial decisions. They’ve tended to capitulate, rather than leading the Labour left by challenging the worst aspects of Starmerism.
How does a man whose watchword is respectability — which, in the context of the legal profession, means avoiding dishonesty at all costs — make his peace with openly abandoning the leadership pledges on which he was elected? Or with behaving so duplicitously that Len McCluskey (who spent a lifetime confronting both bosses and politicians) abandoned negotiations over Corbyn’s suspension on the basis that Starmer is ‘completely untrustworthy’? Useful though the book is at exposing who Starmer is, it remains an enigma how he got there.
As a final point, the book weighs in at less than 200 pages. This is not necessarily a criticism of Eagleton, whose writing is sharp and focused. And it can’t be easy to write about someone who has been so very careful about his image since he gave up writing those early articles. But readers might be left hoping that, if they had become a QC by 40, the leader of a complex political party, and the shadow minister for Brexit during Brexit, their biographer might be able to find a little more to say.
The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, published by Verso, is available from 26th April 2022. This review first appeared in Socialist Lawyer magazine (#89, spring/summer 2022).