I just finished Keir Starmer The Biography by Tom Baldwin. It was really great! What I found surprising is how loyal his friends outside politics genuinely are. They all see him as personable and the life & soul of the party, but in his political career, you get the sense of an individual who is on the outside of the factional war often attributed to Labour, who is a technocrat hellbent on bringing us closer to Europe (not necessarily in Europe - one of the paradoxes of Starmer’s ideology), and someone whose ruthlessness on the front of ‘antisemitism’ both helped his polling, and, in recent times as we know, brought the party’s rating to a standstill with the war in the Middle East.What I get from the book is that he is exceptionally fastidious, thanks to his routes in law, and his winning attitude from his love of football five-to-sides that goes out with the populist electorate his predecessor cultivated, but he has proven to be the most unpolitical politician to be within reaching distance of No. 10. So, it is definitely a great book for learning about ‘Mr Boring’ and ‘No Drama Starmer’. Someone who the right believes goes too hard on the non-dom status the Tories champion, and desire to win over all the Red Wall constituencies, and who the left thinks is a traitor, and someone that Owen Jones once said we should all trust in 2020 and who he was personally friendly with, but who now, in 2024, says is dishonest and duplicitous with an aim to ‘permanently eradicate the left’.But this is someone who doesn’t take his chances lightly, who wants to get the Green energy companies on side, and to develop far more properties than Tories have, and intends to if he gets in for two terms, meaning he is incredibly ambition driven. He is someone who thinks of Labour as far removed from himself, even if it is impossible for that to be the case.The man who, for all his controversies, is seen by many as the most ‘grown up’ politician we have had in years. Interestingly, despite him and Corbyn’s many differences, and Starmer’s aggressive reshuffling approach that is indiscriminate for the most part, both parties have never disparaged each other with childish insults. Unlike Starmer with Boris Johnson and Johnson with Starmer where the gloves were on, and pleasantries dispensed with. The book explores the nuances, childhood experiences, friendly relationships, law career, work as DPP, family relations and the way he moved up the ranks in Labour, and what that could mean from Britain from an impartial author, who clearly has respect for the man he got to know while writing this book, even if he doesn’t agree with everything Keir says or does. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the path Britain could take sooner than later.