Keir Starmer

The Reluctant Politician: 'Superbly written' James O'Brien, TLS

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781783341931
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'A limpid biography at its finest... interesting and necessary' Oliver Rhodes, Reaction

When Keir Starmer won the Labour Party Leadership election in April 2020, the expectation was that he would quickly become a fierce Leader of the Opposition. Instead, his performance was not as sure-footed as his supporters had hoped for, or his opponents feared. Nigel Cawthorne attended Starmer's grammar school a few years before him (and David Walliams). He goes in search of the man behind the headlines, the lawyer who was covered for almost three decades by a gown and horsehair wig in one of Britain's most cloistered professions. 'Good on his legal career, and … grammar school… new to me.' Andrew Sparrow, Senior Political Correspondent Guardian

Vanity Projects

I should start by admitting that this book, the first biography of Keir Starmer, is somewhat driven by a personal interest in the man. Starmer is the MP of Holborn and St Pancras in which Bloomsbury, where I live, is located. I do most of my work in the British Library on Euston Road, also in his constituency. In truth, I feel a bit of connection. As children we also went to the same school, Reigate Grammar School, though not at the same time. I did not know him back then, any more than I knew David Walliams, another former pupil—they both arrived years after I had left.

Back when I attended Reigate the school was state funded. I went on to study physics at University College, London. Starmer went on to do law at Leeds and an advanced degree at Oxford.

However, as ‘Guido Fawkes’ gleefully pointed out on order-order.com, RGS became a fee-paying school around the time Starmer was there.

In 2021, it charged upwards of £19,740 per year. With 1057 pupils, the school was doing very well with average grades of 3 As, and, of the 5000 secondary or so schools in Britain, it is ranked in the top 50 of Britain’s 400 plus independent schools.

In addition, the school could also count on the Leader of the Opposition’s warm support as Ambassador for the RGS Foundation in 2016, even though the Labour 2021 Manifesto calls this type of school ‘the Conservatives’ grammar schools vanity project’.

These fees are curious to consider. Today, a millennial with Starmer’s Surrey background no longer has the automatic educational access that propelled the Leader of the Labour Party himself through his career and dropped him in Parliament running for Prime Minister. They form a considerable threshold, notwithstanding Reigate’s head master being the son of a seventies glam rock-star. Over their GCSEs and Sixth Form a millennial going to RGS will need at least £138,180. Yet funds for bursaries ‘are limited’, RGS tells the parents of prospective pupils.

For our parents—my mother was recently widowed and the Starmers had their own worries—there were no additional financial concerns after the eleven plus. Though not a cinch, free access was still taken for granted. But a millennial in need of financial support will have to compete every year for a limited number of bursaries that may or may not cover the whole of the outlay in a school where they are the odd one out in many ways. Furthermore, those considered in need of financial assistance in 2021 are families with up to ‘a total gross annual income of £85,000’. That is almost twice Britain’s median income in 2020.

I very much doubt that either of our parents could have afforded to send us to RGS these days. If that millennial, possessed with the same eleven plus results as Starmer, didn’t get a bursary and was from a household with Britain’s median disposable income in 2020 of £29,000, their family would be left with £10,000.

Here the RGS Foundation stepped in and administered ‘Changing Lives’ scholarships through its 1675 Bursary Fund and one of its other initiatives was the Henry Smith Club dinner. In 2020, the donation of £1675 a year for seven years by ten club members would support a child through school with the school chipping in the balance of £2990 going forward (in the programme’s first year, 2013, the formula was seven members’ annual donation for one school year of one child).

In January 2017, Starmer himself was one member who fondly spoke of his memories to the Smith Club’s 60 members in the East India Room at the ‘splendid’ East India Club. The club’s president was Sir Peter Gershon, chairman of both Tate & Lyle and National Grid, who was a pupil at the school from 1958 to 1965. At that time, his parents did not have to pay any fees either and Reigate fell well within the ideal of founder Henry Smith to create a ‘free school for the poor children of the Reigate area’. Things have changed somewhat since then.

Starmer is not responsible for the fact that state funding for secondary schooling like ours was cut in the past. But it looks as if his time—and mine—was the last gasp of effortless social mobility.

Many Americans believe in their youth that they can become President of the United States if they apply themselves. In the UK, through Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major ran a similar vector in the twentieth century.

When I was in school, you didn’t have to tell us that we were getting a very good education. In turn, we studied for it, with Starmer maybe bunking off a bit less than I did. At our school, only dances and trips needed to be paid for. And, certainly, those pupils whose parents could afford them felt exclusive.

Today, RGS’s entire existence and not merely its range of extra-curricular activities is predicated on pupils who can afford her fees. No doubt that comes with its own feeling. The school is now a passport to ‘world-class universities, medical school, top-10 ranked universities, Oxbridge, and elite Russell Group courses’ where the eleven plus was previously good enough.

Starmer undoubtedly profited from Reigate and it set him confidently on course for his career successes. Yet—while he was lucky to be on the right side when the axe felled schools like ours—what do things look like for the Starmers of today, female and male, who also would like to become a political leader?

I write this biography in a world where the UK has suffered the highest impact on its population from Corona in Europe if not the world. Despite the first Corona lockdown, however, RGS’s 2020 class headed off ‘to life-changing opportunities with some of the very best results in the country, yet again!’, the school’s website congratulated them.

One wishes today’s Reigate’s pupils the best of luck as much as one can’t begrudge Starmer his early stroke of luck. But what of the other pupils with aptitude in the over 4000 or so state schools in Britain not so fortunate to be well buffeted from the circumstances into which they are born? I am not sure how his and my millennial self are doing.

While baby-boomers by and large couldn’t stand Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn as a 1970s throwback, the sixty seven year old was considered cool enough by Glastonbury revellers for a jubilant billing at its world-famous Pyramid Stage. He pulled in hundreds of thousands hanging on to his words and wearing the T-shirt as a Glastonbury thumbs-up. It was a political first that even Corbyn’s close Parliamentary collaborator Tony Benn had never pulled off with his yearly stage homilies at the festival’s Left Field since 2002.

It is unlikely that Keir Starmer will ever follow in either men’s unelectable wellies if only because he himself has said, ‘The idea that all politicians must now be entertainers I think is interesting, but not right’. Although Starmer once more nimbly defended Glastonbury’s Chief Druid, he seemed to be quashing that hope for the Festival’s bookers.

Yet Tony Blair swept into office having rolled an air of competence, guitar-playing and Cool Britannia into one nationwide personal brand. Starmer will also have to give the next generation at least some hope of progress that is more than a power point presentation of ‘read-outs’ if he wants to lead Labour to power.

If one looks at the 24 prime ministers since 1900, 13 were privately educated (7 of them at Eton) and 9 at selective-entrance state schools (8 of them grammar schools), which tells a story. Of the 12 prime ministers since Starmer’s birth in 1962, 7 prime ministers attended state schools with selective-entrance and 5 independent schools (4 were at Eton). Comprehensive schools have yet to make an entry despite the first one being founded in 1946.

Labour leaders seem at risk of a ‘learn Tory lead Labour’ problem when it comes to education. Tony Blair was privately educated, (Fettes—2021, upwards from £121,770). While Jeremy Corbyn attended a ‘vanity’ grammar school similar to Reigate, director of strategy Seumas Milne went to one of the ‘great nine’ public schools (Winchester) as in fact did Starmer’s left-wing guru Tony Benn (Westminster).

The fact that even Corbyn’s 2019 Labour election manifesto finally dropped the party’s opposition to selective tests after half a century—he voted against in the past—is still not the same as a fair secondary education for younger generations.

In 2019, Starmer himself said, ‘In most walks of life, people are judged by who they are. Politics is different… people do, understandably, want to know who you are and what you come from, but it does feel odd.’ Disarmingly off-guard, he didn’t sugar-coat it when he admitted, ‘I don’t like it.’ While one sympathises with Starmer’s irritation, being a politician is hardly just another job—his parents would agree. They told him to study law.

Starmer’s ambivalent response to politics brings to mind the self-deprecating words of a US senator after being voted out of office, ‘I was the best candidate, but they disagreed—the bastards.’

Henry Smith, born like Starmer in Wandsworth and ostensibly a self-made professional, had the vision thing in 1675, but in 2021 there seems to be some doubt whether Starmer QC does, too. One of the things this biography aims to do is uncover brand Starmer.

It may be unfair that a conservative Etonian politician—whose secondary education weighs in at a value of over £900,000 for him and two brothers, plus a relatively modest £60,000 for his sister—merely has a political case to answer about education and not a personal one. Yet if Johnson were to abolish independent schools tomorrow, few could or would accuse him of unfairly depriving the young who are currently growing up in similar circumstances to his.

For a politician whose platform is ‘change lives for the better’ but whose own advancement—like Corbyn’s—was the result of equitable state support, it looks and feels different. Is it merely a case of optics that the country’s top jobs, including that of Leader of the Opposition, are held by a selectively educated few?

One doesn’t begrudge the good fortune whereby anyone young with aptitude, whatever their background, receives an appropriate education, whether private or public. Starmer’s parents chose a grammar school education for him with the eleven plus, exams for which he worked very hard. Though Labour through and through, they had every opportunity to put their son in a school advocated by their party as better, which they firmly declined to do as will become clear below.

As to what is a good education, the Labour Manifesto 2021 says, ‘The world’s most successful education systems use more continuous assessment, which avoids '<D>teaching for the test'<D>.’ Possibly. But, actually, how would Starmer know? His parents opting for such a method set their bright working-class son on a path of success, as it did with 8 other prime ministers. After a further quarter of a century of Labour leaders since Tony Blair, a case is starting to present itself of good education unequally provided rather than half a century of Labour losing a class-struggle to a 1970s Pink Floyd-style tune.

In the twenty-first century, the vector has changed. Three prime ministers were privately educated and only two went through state schools, and that balance will—depending on the Puritanical grade of the scalpel—at best add O-levels to the ...