Ashcroft Red Flag

The Uneasy Advance of Sir Keir Starmer
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83736-011-6
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten

Sir Keir Starmer made the leap from Leader of the Opposition to Prime Minister in only four years, one of just a handful of politicians to have done so since 1945. Yet the landslide majority that Labour secured under him in July 2024 has been described as 'loveless' and his first months in Downing Street were overshadowed by rows and controversies, turning what should have been a political honeymoon into a period of sustained turbulence. In this fully revised and updated edition of his 2021 biography, Michael Ashcroft traces how Starmer went from schoolboy socialist to radical lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions before - aged fifty-two - becoming an MP, then Labour leader and ultimately the occupant of No. 10. Revealing previously unknown details which help to explain what makes Starmer tick, this careful examination of Britain's first Labour Prime Minister for fourteen years offers voters the chance to assess his character and his political instincts. Having turned his party into an election-winning machine, his goal is to transform Britain into one of the most progressive states in the world. Does he have what it takes to succeed?

LORD ASHCROFT KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democracy Union. 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, a life governor of the Royal Humane Society, a former chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a former trustee of Imperial War Museums. Lord Ashcroft is an award-winning author who has written thirty other books, largely on politics and bravery. His political books include biographies of David Cameron, Kemi Badenoch, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Angela Rayner and Carrie Johnson. His seven books on gallantry in the Heroes series include two on the Victoria Cross.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashcroft, Michael

Leseproben

Introduction

When this book was first published as Red Knight in the late summer of 2021, Sir Keir Starmer’s political prospects looked distinctly shaky. His principal problem was that after barely eighteen months as Labour leader, nobody could be sure what he stood for. In his defence, he had been busy. First, there was the job of trying to patch up a Labour Party that was still badly damaged by its poor showing at the 2019 general election. On top of that, he had to oppose a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson that basked in the glory of an eighty-seat majority – a task that was hugely complicated by the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic. To compound matters, he had just suffered a string of disastrous local election results and the humiliation of losing the solid parliamentary seat of Hartlepool to the Tories in a by-election. Furthermore, his dysfunctional relationship with his deputy, Angela Rayner, had left him open to mockery.

His critics, chief among them Tony Blair, did not hold back. What was his overall plan, they demanded? What were his economic policies? And was he as dull and plodding as he seemed? This disparagement prompted doubts in some quarters about whether Labour would even survive under his leadership. What nobody knew at the time was that he had already had a crisis of confidence and come close to resigning. Only the soothing words of his wife, Victoria, and the advice of his loyal political aide Morgan McSweeney stopped him throwing in the towel. Then his fortunes changed. In November 2021, the Conservative government embarked on the long journey of self-destruction that ended, ultimately, in the ruling party’s worst ever general election defeat in July 2024. Starmer was installed as the first Labour tenant of 10 Downing Street for fourteen years.

Making the transition from shadow Cabinet minister to Leader of the Opposition to Prime Minister in the space of a single parliamentary term was no mean feat. With the help of a small group of trusted lieutenants, he achieved it by jettisoning MPs and party members whose hard-left political opinions he feared might stand in the way of regaining power, and by giving the public the impression that Labour had returned to the centre ground. All this happened with miraculously little damage being sustained to Labour’s image. Starmer’s ruthlessness surprised many – not least one of his former colleagues in Doughty Street Chambers who told me he’d always assumed he was a ‘political wet’. Yet certain thoughts nagged. To what degree was the 2024 general election result a positive vote for the Labour Party as opposed to being just an anti-Tory vote? The turnout was not quite 60 per cent and Labour’s share of the vote was a mere 33.7 per cent – the lowest of any majority party on record. Put another way, 80 per cent of registered electors did not back Labour at the ballot box. What’s more, were Starmer and his top team ready for government? The answers to these questions soon showed themselves.

On paper, Labour’s haul of 412 MPs against the Conservatives’ rump of 121 MPs should have marked the beginning of a period of supremacy for the new Prime Minister. Yet his political honeymoon was cut drastically short and his – and Labour’s – poll ratings plummeted during his first 100 days in office. In part, this was thanks to a series of self-inflicted blunders including manifesto breaches and sleaze scandals. These missteps raised doubts about Starmer’s integrity and his political nous. Confidence in him suffered. More widely, he is also felt to have failed to carve out a reputation as an interesting and original thinker. Most crucially, on the economy his government stands accused of returning to the default setting of previous Labour administrations, via Chancellor Rachel Reeves dishing out public sector pay rises while imposing higher taxes and more bureaucracy on business and enterprise. In doing so, Starmer’s own claim of wanting to put economic growth at the heart of his government’s programme has proved hollow. Additionally, in defiance of the millions who voted for Brexit in 2016, he has forged closer ties with the EU. And his insistence on trying to make Britain net zero by 2050 is set to cost taxpayers multiple billions of pounds. After nearly a year in power, it is not difficult to see why his government is scrambling for consistently better poll ratings, even taking into account the role he began to play in world affairs at the time of going to press. For very different reasons, his position is weak again, just as it was in the late summer of 2021.

Little was then known about Starmer other than that most of his adult life had been spent outside elected politics, as a barrister from 1987 until 2008 and as the Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. He became a Labour parliamentary candidate in December 2014 and entered the Commons in May 2015 at the relatively late age of fifty-two. Five years afterwards, he was elected Labour leader. In Red Knight I sought to find out more about him, but it became clear in the early stages of the project that he did not want the book to be written. Indeed, he actively obstructed it, telling friends – who then told me – that he would rather they did not co-operate. I wrote in 2021 that while I am the first to accept that everybody is entitled to a private life, I also believe that any politician who wishes to present themself to the country as the Prime Minister in waiting should have a skin thick enough to be untroubled by a study of their character. He seemed to think it would be acceptable for him to stand for the highest office in the land without some probing questions about him being asked in a truly unrestrained way. This reaction confirmed that he is by nature cautious and defensive. He is also uncomfortable with the rough and tumble of politics.

As it turned out, many people who have known Starmer at various stages of his life were happy to help. Some did so publicly; others preferred to do so anonymously. Their recollections contributed to the book’s accuracy. This can be stated with certainty because in 2023 Starmer agreed to give a series of interviews to the journalist Tom Baldwin. Their conversations formed the basis of what became Baldwin’s sanctioned biography of Starmer. Much of the independently researched detail found in the pages of Red Knight also features in Baldwin’s book.

Starmer is hard to fathom at the best of times but is easily portrayed as a man of contradictions. Having attended a fee-paying school and the University of Leeds, gone on to study for a year at the University of Oxford, become a successful barrister, been appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, accepted a knighthood, entered the Commons and now become Prime Minister, he is undeniably a member of the establishment. And yet despite having succeeded in life thanks to his own hard work, he seems always to be at pains to distance himself from the establishment by speaking so often of his ‘working-class’ roots and his socialism. It is as though he is worried that the public will think less of him for having done well off his own bat.

This perception of him facing in two directions at once dominated his first years in Parliament. Having become a knight of the realm in 2014, he made it clear that he would rather not be addressed as ‘Sir Keir’. When he took up the post of shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union from 2016, he promised to honour the Brexit referendum result, only to demand a second vote later on. He remained in the shadow Cabinet when Labour was plagued by allegations of antisemitism but did not speak up publicly in any meaningful way for the Jewish community – despite his wife’s Jewish background. He campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister twice, at the 2017 and 2019 general elections, and then denounced him, saying he had never considered him a friend and was always ‘certain that we would lose the 2019 election’. As Leader of the Opposition, he was at pains to portray himself as being of the left but, under him, Labour was rebuilt by those on the party’s right. This has naturally made some wonder whether he was interested in gaining power for the sake of it, or whether he is driven by something more principled.

Starmer calls himself a socialist and yet, although well-off in his own right, he and his wife were happy to accept thousands of pounds’ worth of clothes paid for by the Labour donor Lord Alli, a multi-millionaire proponent of capitalism. His key election promise was to grow the economy, but his government’s policies appear to have hindered that aspiration. As for his popular appeal, all the signs are that despite his image as a football-mad man of the people, he struggles to connect with the electorate – and they have difficulty identifying with him. Most polls conducted since July 2024 have served as a reminder that he has never been as liked or as respected as Britain’s most successful leaders have been. His lack of captivating communication skills has not helped him, though, in a way, it does make his victory in 2024 more remarkable.

Having looked at Starmer’s life before he entered No. 10, it seemed only right that I should chart his first months as premier. As well as tracking his progress from 5 July 2024, the day he formed his government, I have revised and updated sections of...