Red Knight: The Unauthorised Biography of Sir Keir Starmer

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Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. The next chapters are broken down into his early political career, campaigning to become an MP in the safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras and his time in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Brexit Minister where is Machiavellian instincts are revealed expertly by Eagleton before the final chapter which details his underhanded campaign to become Labour leader; positioning himself as a continuity candidate in terms of socially progressive policy making but also as someone who could unite the Party. Because Rodney Starmer, the Labour leader’s father, was not employed as a toolmaker, but self-employed; and because the parents bought a house and once posed for a photograph with the Duke of Kent, “perhaps it would be most accurate to say that [his background] was neither ‘working class’ … nor ‘posh’ but … petit bourgeois”. Before the Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn entered the race – clinching the necessary number of nominations at the last minute – Burnham was widely thought to be the frontrunner. As an academic who worked closely with Sunak in Government, I feel pretty well placed to say that the book just about perfectly got the measure of the man, as a personality, policy-maker and politician.

One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up isn’t due out until August, but a draft has been submitted to the publisher and it has a cover image. Morgan McSweeney, the guiding light behind Labour Together, is today one of the most powerful people in the Party, a key figure in selecting future parliamentary candidates. An aide who worked closely with Starmer between 2016 and 2019 reflected that this was ‘typical of Keir. The claimants threatened to sue the Party for breach of Data Protection leaked by a whistleblower of Whatsap messaging between the cabal. Initially I felt as though the author was just cherry picking the bad stuff, but the bad stuff really piles up.

He has published six books, three of them bestsellers in his native South Africa, and has written for publications including the Guardian and the Independent. The ambitious shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, is working on a memoir of his humble childhood in the East End of London.

At Westminster, he was swiftly elevated to the shadow Cabinet, and in April 2020 he became the leader of the Labour Party. The overall impression is of a decent enough man, perhaps over promoted but just weak, weak, weak particularly over his flip flopping over Brexit, he is just not a man to inspire. Many of us who follow politics, especially on social media, are aware of much of what this book relates.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He is founder and chairman of the board of trustees of Crimestoppers, vice-patron of the Intelligence Corps Museum, chairman of the trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, a senior fellow of the International Strategic Studies Association, former chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a former trustee of Imperial War Museums. Oliver Eagleton quite rightly cites Brexit as the main reason Corbyn's Labour was so soundly beaten. The 2021 local elections and Hartlepool by-election did not resurrect the Red Wall and only in the Tory-blue South did his party make cosmetic gains. The only option was to propose bold policies, like a progressive Leave deal, that could break through the negative press coverage.