The Starmer Project

Oliver Eagleton is an editor at New Left Review. He writes on culture and politics for the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Novara Media.

The Starmer Project

A Journey to the Right

Oliver Eagleton

First published by Verso 2022

© Oliver Eagleton 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-462-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-464-6 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-465-3 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eagleton, Oliver, author.

Title: The Starmer project : a journey to the right / Oliver Eagleton.

Description: London ; New York : Verso Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022002080 (print) | LCCN 2022002081 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839764622 (paperback) | ISBN 9781839764653 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Starmer, Keir, 1962¬– | Labour Party (Great Britain) – Biography. | Great Britain – Politics and government – 2007– | Politicians – Great Britain – Biography.

Classification: LCC DA591.S726 E34 2022 (print) | LCC DA591.S726 (ebook) | DDC 324.24107 – dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002080

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002081

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

Introduction

1. The Lawyer

2. The Politician

3. The Candidate

4. The Leader

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Introduction

Keir Starmer’s election as leader of the Labour Party was met with elation from almost every major media outlet. Writing in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee contrasted Starmer – whom she described as ‘a trusted, tried and tested, big-brained grown-up’ – with the ‘raw incompetence’ of his predecessor, who had sealed Labour’s fate in the 2019 election. ‘Where there was no effective opposition, a void, a limbo, now in Keir Starmer the party has a grand prosecutor well qualified to hold the government’s feet to the fire.’ She was echoed by her Observer colleague Andrew Rawnsley, who wrote that ‘serious times call for serious people’, and predicted Starmer’s ‘sober style’ would make him untouchable for the Tories.¹ ITV’s Robert Peston declared that Labour was once again ‘serious about winning power’, while the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg highlighted the historic significance of Sir Keir’s victory: ‘Whatever your own politics,’ she tweeted, ‘this is a really big moment – Labour could now be an opposition that gets things done + carries out effective scrutiny.’ In the Telegraph, Patrick O’Flynn remarked that ‘Keir Starmer is showing the hysterical Left how effective opposition is done’. The Independent applauded Starmer’s ‘grown-up debating style, his attention to detail and his preference for persuasion’. The Economist branded him ‘Labour’s electable new leader’. The New Statesman ran a front cover depicting him as a knight in shining armour. The Times went with ‘In a swoon over Sir Keir’.²

Starmer’s most favourable quality, as far as these journalists were concerned, was not being Jeremy Corbyn. But he had other selling points as well. Minor embellishment could give his backstory a rags-to-riches gloss: from son of a toolmaker to Britain’s most senior prosecutor, overseeing thousands of staff at the Crown Prosecution Service. He was an authority on European human rights law, a high-profile defender of civil liberties, a tireless campaigner against the death penalty, and, eventually, a frontbench politician, leading the parliamentary battle against Brexit. ‘Starmer’s impressive CV will have the Tories running scared’, wrote one commentator. He represented the perfect balance of opposites: working-class credentials and establishment credibility; political principle and pragmatic compromise; distance from Westminster and insider knowledge of the state. Starmer was neither a New Labour heirloom nor a continuity Corbynite, but ‘a man with no enemies’ who could end the party’s factional war. The pre-eminent ‘sensible radical’, in the words of Times reporter Patrick Maguire.³

Positive perceptions of Starmer radiated from the press to the general public. Two months in, he ranked as the most popular opposition leader since Tony Blair, with a net approval rating of 31 per cent. As the government mis-handled the Covid-19 crisis, Starmer became the country’s preferred choice for prime minister, adopting a relentless focus on competence and juxtaposing his professionalism with Boris Johnson’s bluster. His performances at the dispatch box were seen as exemplars of forensic criticism. Surveys indicated that voters who had abandoned Labour over Brexit were returning to the fold. Starmer was described as ‘trustworthy’, ‘likeable’, ‘strong’, ‘decisive’. In August 2020, Labour achieved its highest ratings since the twilight of Theresa May’s premiership.⁴

Once the vaccine rollout eased the government’s pandemic problems, however, Starmer receded from the spotlight, and the public were left with little sense of his principles or policies. By mid-2021 the honeymoon was over. He consistently trailed the Tories – sometimes by 15 per cent margins – and his popularity sank below that of Corbyn.⁵ On 6 May the Hartlepool byelection saw Labour lose a seat it had held for six decades with a significant swing to the Conservatives. Eight councils switched hands and more than 300 Labour councillors were ejected. The leader’s response compounded the impression that his party had become rudderless. He vowed to take ‘full responsibility’ for the result, before sacking almost all his closest advisers and attempting to demote his deputy, Angela Rayner. Six weeks later, Labour picked up only 622 votes in the Chesham and Amersham byelection. Members resigned at a rate of 8,000 per month and trade unions cut their funding. Without their contributions the party finances took a nosedive, and Labour offered redundancy packages to almost a third of its workforce.⁶ Starmer’s cross-examinations at prime minister’s questions grew less confident. Internal polls showed that millions of key voters barely noticed his interventions.

Why had the sheen worn off so quickly? Starmer blamed lockdown, noting that he had not yet had the chance to shake people’s hands or speak in front of a live audience. As restrictions began to lift, he told the press he was ‘looking forward to taking the mask off and opening the throttle’. His party narrowly held the West Yorkshire seat of Batley and Spen on 1 July, granting the leader a reprieve. Yet a summer tour of Britain drew a muted response from voters, with some panellists advising Starmer that he was ‘wasting his time’.⁷

In step with this decline, previously sympathetic publications became sceptical. The Guardian leader writers warned that ‘Sir Keir urgently needs to clarify what his party is about’. Rafael Behr, who had once hailed Starmer’s victory as ‘a huge advance for the opposition’, now enjoined him to ‘express himself with something approximating originality and colour’. The Economist criticized his ‘failure to produce a vision of the future’, asking, ‘What happens if, for all his positive qualities of decency and determination, he just doesn’t have what it takes?’ In the New Statesman, Stephen Bush observed that ‘a consensus is forming among the commentariat that Keir Starmer is not up to the job.’ Disillusioned staffers rounded on their former boss, asserting that he ‘desperately needs to stand for something’.⁸

But then came a second sharp reversal of fortune, as Starmer was lifted by a favourable tide of Tory corruption scandals culminating in the revelation that Johnson had broken lockdown rules. Starmer was obliged temporarily to disappear from public view once again due to a positive Covid result, just as the garden-party revelations broke in mid-January 2022. The absence did his polling figures no harm. A ten-point opinion poll lead for the Conservatives had been transformed into a ten-point lead for Labour in a matter of weeks. By this time the initial image of Starmer as a savvy operator was irrecoverable. There was a smattering of renewed media praise for his lawyerly demeanour, but also a crossing of fingers by anxious well-wishers that the Labour leader could make the most of the political opening. ‘Keir Starmer’s moment has come: he must not squander it,’ fretted Steve Richards in the Financial Times. Would it be possible for Starmer to remain largely inert and profit from disappointment with a crisis-prone Conservative Party? ‘The problem, the polls find, is a lack of positive reasons to vote Labour,’ worried Toynbee.⁹ But polling gains, however fragile, will ensure Starmer survives to fight the general election as Labour leader, and a Starmer government can’t be ruled out.

This underscores the importance of examining his political programme. Starmer has not presented a unified, consistent ideology, hence the confusion over what he ‘stands for’. But he does have a project – a vision, of sorts – and a coherent strategy to achieve it, which is yet to be analysed in detail. Indeed, it is an indication of how little remains known about Starmer’s outlook that his actions are usually interpreted as overtures to others, from Blairite advisers to wavering Red Wall voters to Labour Friends of Israel. To anatomize his leadership, it is not enough to cast him as an empty vessel for these influences. We must rather uncover the more durable aspects of his thought-world and assess their relevance to the present conjuncture.

Of course, Labour’s troubles stretch back further than Sir Keir. Its total seat share has been cut in half over the past two decades: a rot that set in almost immediately after Blair’s 1997 victory, with Labour’s popular vote plummeting in successive elections amid a collapse in overall turnout. In 2005, it polled at only 35 per cent: the lowest recorded level for any winning party. New Labour’s financialized economic model unravelled during the banking crisis three years later; yet neither Gordon Brown nor Ed Miliband was willing to break with it – driving scores of voters to UKIP and the Tories.¹⁰ The social democratic renovation of the Corbyn period returned the best election result in recent memory, but by 2019 its momentum had been destroyed by Brexit, and the party faced an uphill battle to regain its relevance.

Although it is instructive to situate Starmer’s tenure in this narrative of long-term decline, to understand Labour’s current trajectory we must also look closely at the man himself. What kind of politician is he? Why was he perceived by many former Corbyn supporters as the optimal candidate to take the helm, yet subsequently unable – or unwilling – to fulfil the hopes he inspired? How can we explain his success in remaking the party along with his struggle to command public confidence? To what extent does he represent a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives? Whereas previous biographers have discussed Starmer’s family and academic background – largely neglecting his record as director of public prosecutions and shadow Brexit secretary – this portrait will focus on his political formation.¹¹ The first chapters will assess his legal career and role in the EU controversy of 2016–19, spotlighting the alliances he forged on his ascent to the party’s summit, while the final section will identify the distinguishing features of his leadership. Despite the ups and downs of its electoral prospects, one thing is certain: the Starmer project has already had a powerful effect on Britain’s political climate – reconsolidating New Labourism with none of its original élan, and reversing almost every gain made by the Left during the Corbyn era.

1
The Lawyer

On 25 October 2003, residents of the southern English hamlet of Firle gathered for the centuries-old festivity that has made their area famous: a torchlit procession and bonfire, replete with occultic costumes and folk dancing. The ritual is usually themed around an issue that has ‘troubled the local community’ over the past year, so on this occasion the Firle Bonfire Society decided to address the creation of a nearby traveller encampment.¹ They commandeered a caravan, slapped on a number plate that read ‘P1KEY’, and wheeled it through the streets while playing wooden fifes and brandishing burning crosses. When they reached a field outside the village, effigies of traveller children were placed inside the vehicle and it was set alight, to cheers from local onlookers.

The incident took place amid a campaign of intimidation against the Sussex traveller population, which had twice been targeted by arson attacks in recent months. Travellers were forced off their site in Peacehaven when a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a caravan with young children asleep inside. Shortly after, a petrol-soaked firework was set off in a Crawley camp.² The director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, was keen to charge the bonfire organizers with incitement to racial hatred. He asked a staffer at the Crown Prosecution Service to find a QC who could advise on the case. ‘But not just any QC,’ he said. ‘There’s this young lawyer who’s all about human rights – you must get him.’

Keir Starmer was forty-one years old and had recently been named Human Rights Lawyer of the Year by the campaign group Liberty.³ He was known as an ambitious left-wing barrister who worked pro bono for environmental activists, trade unionists and poll tax protesters. Yet when he returned his judgement on the Firle incident, it was not what Macdonald expected. The advice stated unequivocally that the organizers should not be prosecuted. Starmer argued that their actions were not intended to stoke prejudice, nor serious enough to merit legal sanction, and called for the charges to be scrapped. The DPP deferred to his opinion and the Merry England mob walked free.

Young socialist

Starmer’s career up to that point had been a curious blend of progressive litigation and service to the British state. Born in Southwark, London, in 1962, his mother was a nurse and his father ran a small toolmaking business. Both were Labour supporters from industrial working-class backgrounds who may have named him after the Keir (Hardie), although Starmer never confirmed this assumption.⁴ The family settled in Oxted, an affluent commuter town in Surrey, where Starmer spent his childhood – attending Reigate state grammar school from 1974 to 1981, and taking weekend trips to the Junior Guildhall School of Music for flute lessons. Reigate became a fee-paying institution in Starmer’s third academic year, but his cohort was allowed to stay on free of charge, creating a two-tier student body. Classmates recall Starmer debating Thatcherism with wealthier peers on the school-bus journey. At sixteen he joined a local chapter of the Labour Party Young Socialists, showing up at sparsely attended meetings every month in the outbuilding of a friend’s parents’ house. He and his comrades heckled Geoffrey Howe at an Oxted fun-run and canvassed for James Callaghan during the 1979 election campaign. The East Surrey Constituency Labour Party was dominated by the Left, but its youth wing was more closely aligned with proto–social democratic forces. When a regional party official came to vet the Young Socialists for ‘extremism’ as part of a national initiative to stamp out Bennite influence, he reported back to his superiors that the group was a beacon of moderation.⁵

Starmer’s ambition was to read politics at Leeds, but his parents convinced him to pick a more employable degree. After receiving a bachelor’s in law in 1985 he ascended to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, for postgraduate study, where he deepened his interest in international human rights and decided to become a barrister. Along with his friends in the Oxford Labour Club, Starmer supported striking print-workers on the picket lines at Wapping in 1986 as they tried to obstruct the distribution of the Sunday Times, provoking a backlash from student activists on the Labour Right including David Miliband and Stephen Twigg.⁶ A year later, while attending the Bar Vocational Course, Starmer surveyed the Wapping dispute in the pages of Socialist Alternatives, a small magazine affiliated with the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. He wrote that the paramilitary policing methods deployed to crush the strike illustrated Thatcher’s reliance on coercion to push through her market reforms. For Starmer, the printworkers’ defeat was not only an emblem of Britain’s neoliberal turn; it was also an opportunity for socialists to rethink fundamental questions of state power, such as ‘the role the police should play, if any, in civil society. Who are they protecting and from what? Who controls them and for whose benefit?’ He argued that ‘policing of any sort that is unaccountable stands directly in the path of social emancipation’, and encouraged the labour movement to develop an institutional critique that went beyond flaccid denunciations of police violence, calling for greater community oversight as the antidote to such abuses.⁷

Socialist Alternatives was produced by a collective called Socialist Self-Management, a tiny post-Trotskyist grouplet with links to the Pabloite factions of Labour and the Green Party, which sought to build a coalition rooted in new social movements, queer politics and ecologism. Peter Tatchell, the LGBT campaigner whom Starmer got to know during this period, described the group as ‘anti-Stalinist’ and ‘anti-statist’.⁸ Starmer joined the editorial collective in summer 1986, evidently at the suggestion of his Oxford contemporary Benjamin Schoendorff. During his brief involvement with this ‘Red-Green’ front, he read Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) and was convinced by its vision of an open, heterogeneous struggle for egalitarian democracy.⁹ His writings explored models of grassroots organizing that could resist the Thatcherite onslaught, from pluralistic trade unionism to municipal self-government.¹⁰ He approved of Neil Kinnock’s break with a bygone model of ‘state socialism’, but in its place he called for ‘participatory socialism based on democratic planning’ rather than an embrace of the market. ‘Self-managing socialism aims at reducing the role of the state to its coordinating functions whereby various self-managing initiatives can be brought together’, he wrote at age twenty-four. ‘What is important is that any state level “coordination” must, by very definition, come and be controlled from the “bottom up”.’¹¹

Progressive lawyer

Starmer was called to the Bar in 1987 and hired as a legal officer by Liberty, shedding his association with the Socialist Alternatives, which folded after its fifth issue. Several of his co-editors joined the steering committee of the Socialist Society, a group of radical intellectuals including Hilary Wainwright, Michael Rustin and the writers clustered around New Left Review, which aimed to forge links between the Labour Left and the wider socialist movement. Starmer attended their meetings into the late ’80s, co-authoring a policy paper on judicial reform for the Society’s third conference (co-sponsored by Tony Benn).¹² In 1990 he became a founding member of Doughty Street Chambers – established by thirty liberal barristers who broke with tradition by moving outside the Inns of Court – and was elected secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Starmer wrote for the Haldane’s in-house magazine on topics ranging from collective bargaining legislation to human rights jurisprudence. One of his earliest contributions was a defence of the ‘acid house’ scene which stressed the need to protect it from Thatcher’s joyless legacy, and claimed – with some naivety – that drugs and alcohol were entirely absent from rave culture.¹³ A year later, in a critical piece on the political philosopher Christine Sypnowich, Starmer urged the Left to consider the role of legal institutions in post-capitalist society, writing, ‘Only when a concept of socialist law is developed will socialist lawyers join their liberal colleagues in the unfolding theoretical debates of the 1990s.’¹⁴ A follow-up for the magazine’s special ‘Human Rights Issue’ analysed international human rights treaties as a tool for tackling material inequality, contra denunciations of ‘rights discourse’ as an outgrowth of bourgeois individualism. Starmer welcomed the prospect of a UK human rights act, asserting: ‘Our task, as socialist lawyers, is to begin on the difficult road of drafting an instrument worthy of our conception of democracy which holds out the promise of an equal (or at any rate more equal) distribution not only of political power, but also of economic power.’¹⁵

The lawyer’s gradual mutation can be seen in these essays from the early ’90s, as an emphasis on legislative fixes supplants the short-lived dalliance with street-level activism. Other members of the Haldane executive committee were suspicious of what they described as his attempt to ‘NGOify’ the organization by remaking it in the image of Liberty – focusing on charitable work, professional development courses, press relations and political lobbying. In their view, Starmer’s aim was to weaken the Haldane’s links with Communist groups such as the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and refashion it as a ‘human rights-ist’ institution with a high media profile. His peers rebuked him when he suggested excising ‘socialism’ from the society’s name and replacing it with ‘progressive’ or ‘democratic’.¹⁶ Bill Bowring, the Haldane’s former chair, told me that Starmer’s politics were more naturally aligned with the centre-left Society of Labour Lawyers, but that he joined the Haldane because he was more able to rise through the organization’s ranks and reshape it from within. ‘He was motivated by ambition,’ said Bowring. ‘He was never going to get involved in anything revolutionary, and he had no sympathy whatsoever for Militant. But in Haldane he saw an opportunity to create something.’

Starmer spearheaded this internal overhaul while starting up his own successful private practice and taking on reams of pro bono work. He assisted Greenpeace campaigners Helen Steel and David Morris during the ‘McLibel trial’, later the subject of an award-winning Ken Loach documentary. The defendants were sued by McDonald’s for distributing a fact-sheet detailing its environmentally destructive practices. Unable to access legal aid, they relied on Starmer’s cost-free advice to construct their argument, which was pitted against the multi-million-pound case brought by the fast-food giant. Steel and Morris fought McDonald’s from the lowest to the highest courts between 1990 and 1999 (the longest trial in English legal history), substantiating most of the accusations in the Greenpeace leaflet with the help of expert witnesses. After putting the corporation on the backfoot and whittling down its compensation claim, Starmer acted as their representative at the European Court of Human Rights, where he successfully argued that their fundamental rights had been breached by the denial of legal aid.¹⁷

The Belfast connection

With the McLibel case ongoing, Starmer accompanied thirteen other Haldane lawyers on a 1992 fact-finding mission to Northern Ireland, investigating allegations of police brutality under the government’s Emergency Provisions.¹⁸ The delegation sat in on Diplock trials (which took place without a jury), interviewed prisoners who had been mistreated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and examined the implications of removing the right to silence.¹⁹ Their evidence was collected in a scathing report which called for a return to due process and an end to enhanced interrogation tactics by police. Starmer later represented a group of IRA inmates who had been beaten and humiliated by British prison officers after an unsuccessful breakout attempt at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire. (Thanks to his efforts they were awarded thousands of pounds in damages by the High Court, sending the right-wing press into meltdown.)²⁰ But he also surprised some of his comrades on the London Left by agreeing to defend Private Lee Clegg: a British soldier who had shot dead a young Catholic woman in west Belfast. Clegg was manning an army checkpoint when a car full of joyriders passed through at high speed. He and his squadron fired nineteen bullets into the vehicle, killing two of its passengers. The soldier received a life sentence but was released under licence in 1995 after a campaign led by the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and the Sun – amplified by backbench Tory MPs.²¹ When the case went to a retrial, Starmer managed to get Clegg cleared of murder, and he later returned to active service. The barrister refused to share his views on the Troubles or Irish reunification while representing Clegg, but he would reportedly take weekly trips to the Belfast garrison to play football with the troops.²²

In 1997, Starmer was enlisted by Amnesty International to convince British politicians of the virtues of the European Convention on Human Rights. He co-authored a pamphlet explaining the concrete steps that could be taken to incorporate ECHR provisions into UK law, and found that many of its recommendations were adopted by the Blair government following the passage of the 1998 Human Rights Act. This put Starmer in a privileged position to grasp the implications of New Labour’s human rights reforms, which redrew the relationship between domestic law and the Strasbourg institutions. He became one of the foremost interpreters of the HRA’s wide-ranging effects on British jurisprudence, sought out by barristers who had previously considered him part of the profession’s ‘lefty fringe’.²³ His research culminated in European Human Rights Law (1999): a fine-grained analysis of the HRA, reviewing 1,500 Strasbourg cases which created new protocols for domestic civil and criminal prosecutions.²⁴ The book was a best-seller in legal circles, and on the strength of its scholarship Starmer – now a QC – was hired as an adviser to the Northern Irish Policing Board (NIPB): a by-product of the Good Friday Agreement, established to calm communal tensions over police powers in Ulster.

The NIPB job required Starmer to monitor the activities of the recently created Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), oversee its compliance with human rights protocols and write a series of reports setting out his recommendations for the force, as well as delivering the keynote speech at the Northern Irish ‘Confidence in Policing’ conference. This was an opportunity to implement the reforms recommended in the 1992 Haldane document, yet by this time Starmer’s priorities had changed. When he accepted the position in 2003, the NIPB was facing a boycott over concerns that the police were still under the sway of a British security establishment hostile to the peace process. Sinn Féin refused to engage with the PSNI until a number of conditions were met: devolving control over policing and justice from Westminster to Northern Ireland; ratifying the provisions set out in the Patten Report (which aimed to establish a truly desectarianized police service); and launching an inquiry into collusion between Northern Irish police and loyalist terrorists.²⁵ The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission criticized the new policing body for its lack of accountability, transparency and community engagement.²⁶

Starmer gave short shrift to these concerns. His submissions to the NIPB were studiedly uncritical, overflowing with praise for the PSNI’s ‘utter commitment’ to human rights compliance.²⁷ In July 2004, Belfast police allowed unionists to march through a Catholic neighbourhood while brandishing paramilitary insignia. When clashes broke out with local residents, riot police moved in to attack nationalist counter-demonstrators, deploying a water cannon and beating a Sinn Féin politician with a truncheon.²⁸ Starmer condoned the policing methods, writing that the PSNI ‘properly took all the relevant factors into account’ in deciding how to deal with the unrest, and insisting that the decision to allow through Protestant paramilitaries ‘cannot be faulted’.²⁹ When Sinn Féin eventually agreed to recognize the Policing Board, they called for an immediate end to police violence – asking the NIPB to issue an explicit ban on the use of tasers and plastic bullets against children. Starmer threw out their request.³⁰ In 2005, when he arrived at Stormont Hotel for the launch of that year’s report, republican protesters greeted him with a banner that read, ‘Who sanctioned British death squads? Time for the truth.’

The Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley Jr, who worked closely with Starmer and the NIPB, praised his work. The QC, he said,

gave us the tools and the arguments and the defence lines to allow us to say that the water cannon are necessary or plastic bullets are allowed. They are still permissible today, as shown in the riots of April 2021. And all police officers in Northern Ireland carry a gun. The argument for retaining this was defended. I would say his lasting legacy is that you can have all of these accoutrements to policing provided they meet human rights guidelines effectively, and he provided the board with the arguments to do that and the legal cover to do it.³¹

Yet Starmer’s involvement with the NIPB did not mark a complete repudiation of progressive causes. He kept one foot in the NGO world, working with Amnesty to argue that ‘coerced evidence’ – that’s to say information extracted by torture – should not be permissible in UK courts. The House of Lords agreed with Starmer, dealing a significant blow to Blair’s Home Office.³² The QC also expressed his opposition to the Iraq War, dismantling the government’s legal justifications in the comment pages of the Guardian, and pointing out that an unlawful invasion may leave military commanders subject to prosecution.³³ The same year he accepted the NIPB job, he represented five migrants who challenged New Labour’s policy of denying basic welfare provisions to refugees that fail to make an asylum claim immediately upon arriving in Britain. The courts ruled in the applicants’ favour, prompting outrage and accusations of judicial activism from the government.

During this period Starmer also undertook strategic litigation to combat repressive sentencing practices in the Caribbean. With the help of the Death Penalty Project, a London-based legal action group, he used colonial-era rights of appeal to refer cases where defendants were facing execution to the Privy Council. By winning these cases, he was able to effectively abolish the mandatory death penalty in several Caribbean countries where it was used as a deterrent mechanism. The same strategy was later deployed in Uganda, Kenya and Malawi, gaining reprieves for thousands of prisoners.³⁴ For Starmer and his co-appellant Edward Fitzgerald, the mandatory use of the death penalty – ‘without an opportunity to put forward mitigation’ – was unjustifiable. The success of their litigation, they wrote, ‘reflects an evolving international norm that it is wrong to sentence to death all those convicted of murder and leave it to the mercy stage to decide who should live and who should die’. Yet they made clear that they did not oppose capital punishment per se: ‘Rather the death penalty should be imposed by a Court only for the worst cases of murder, where the crime is particularly heinous.’³⁵

Chief prosecutor

Having risen to the upper tiers of his profession – charting a careful course between good-cause legal campaigning and collaboration with the security services – Starmer got back in touch with Ken Macdonald in 2007, visiting him at the Crown Prosecution Service offices to inquire about the upcoming DPP vacancy. As head of the CPS, the DPP oversees criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. He or she has the final say over whether to bring charges against a suspect, although much of the organization’s routine casework is handled by its vast network of state lawyers, who at that time made up half of its 8,000-person workforce. They advise the police on investigations, determine the appropriate charges and present evidence on behalf of the crown. The DPP is tasked with managing their activities and liaising with the heads of regional prosecution services, as well as intervening in complex or high-profile cases.

Macdonald, a liberal barrister who founded a chambers specializing in human rights law, was the first defence lawyer to assume the role. His appointment gave the CPS a progressive veneer, and his attempts to revitalize the institution – by establishing several new departments and boosting its public profile – complemented the modernizing ethos of the Blair government. Starmer’s human rights record, coupled with his loyalty to the NIPB, made him a natural successor, as Macdonald told him in their meeting. He was ‘probably the first high-level human rights activist to attain the upper reaches of government in this jurisdiction’, according to a former colleague, lending credibility to an administration whose civil liberties record had been tarnished by the War on Terror.³⁶ Brown’s cabinet welcomed Starmer’s application, and he was officially appointed by the attorney general, Patricia Scotland, in July 2008.

The new DPP laid out his vision for the CPS in an interview with Counsel Magazine the following January. He pledged to nurture its ‘open relationship with the media’, promote legal advocacy work and conduct a ‘root-and-branch review’ to professionalize the CPS in light of administrative shortcomings identified by its inspectorate. He was intent that it should not just be a ‘credible national institution’ but a ‘world class prosecution service’.³⁷ Yet his plan to achieve this differed from Macdonald’s. Sir Ken tried to combat the ‘overweening power of the Bar’ by seizing cases from barristers in private practice and bringing them in-house, fostering own-brand CPS lawyers rather than outsourcing the bulk of their casework.³⁸ By contrast, Starmer’s plan emphasized working practices over personnel. He drew up a set of ‘Core Quality Standards’ to guide CPS employees, detailing the ‘benchmarks of quality’ in areas ranging from casework preparation to communication with victims. These standards were determined through exhaustive consultations – with prosecutors, judges, police, victims – as well as a seminar programme attended by senior figures in the legal establishment. For some, this was an exercise in slow, careful reflection on CPS protocols which guaranteed their future efficacy while avoiding confrontation with the Bar.³⁹ For one former high-ranking CPS lawyer, though, it evinced an ‘obsession with process’ that had little practical value, issuing in a set of managerial buzzwords with limited resemblance to actual ‘quality’.

Starmer begged his staff to call him ‘Keir’ and expressed his intention to give up his private chauffeur (yet he failed to do so during his first two years on the job, during which time he reportedly claimed more than £160,000 in expenses for the four-mile drive between his home and the CPS offices).⁴⁰ He continued to run the biweekly rota for his amateur football team and found time for his new-born child despite the gruelling workload. No sooner had he arrived at the CPS than he was given the case of Daniel James, a twenty-three-year-old rugby player who, having been paralysed when a scrum collapsed during a training session, persuaded his reluctant parents to arrange an assisted suicide in Zurich. Asked to decide whether the family should face charges, Starmer launched the largest public consultation in CPS history, not only soliciting the advice of senior legal practitioners, but hosting discussion groups with religious organizations and euthanasia campaigners. His first decision as DPP was commendable: ruling out the prosecution of James’s parents on the basis that a conviction would not be in the public interest.⁴¹ A subsequent policy paper, presented by Starmer to the House of Lords, confirmed that this precedent would be followed in future cases.⁴²

During his first weeks in office Starmer mapped out a timeline for the entirety of his CPS tenure: year one, evaluate the organization; year two, devise a reform strategy; year three, implement it; year four, begin to prepare for a successor. He immediately set about visiting every regional CPS division to identify their operational weaknesses, then fed this information into eight high-level seminars on the criminal justice system which generated his ‘roadmap’ for years two and three. Many of the ensuing changes were bland and administrative – revamping the CPS filing system to decrease reliance on paper, for instance – but others were more substantial. He instituted the Victims’ Right to Review scheme, which allows alleged victims to appeal against a CPS decision not to prosecute, and wrote a revised Code for Crown Prosecutors, which clearly articulates the legal standards for bringing a case to trial.

Yet Starmer’s hopes for the service were constrained by swingeing budget cuts which began under Brown and increased under the Tory–Lib Dem coalition. As early as 2009 the CPS headquarters was on track to lose 11 per cent of its workers, and a web of bureaucracy had been created to authorize everyday expenses for witnesses and court interpreters.⁴³ When Dominic Grieve became attorney general in 2010, he instructed Starmer to make cutbacks that left CPS teams across the country strained and understaffed. The pair met once a month to discuss the measures. Grieve has since spoken of his ‘very good working relationship’ with the DPP, who executed the reforms ‘with great efficiency’. (Three years later, Ed Miliband bumped into Grieve in Portcullis House and informed him that Starmer planned to run for parliament after he left the CPS. Miliband asked Grieve whether he thought Starmer would make a good politician. ‘I do,’ replied the attorney general. ‘He’s outstanding.’)⁴⁴

Grieve’s opinion of Starmer was shared by the rest of the coalition cabinet. Later in his career, Starmer would play up his occasional public spats with the government: in October 2009, several Tory backbenchers demanded his resignation when he used the CPS annual lecture to praise the HRA amid their attempts to repeal it; and in February 2012 he ordered the prosecution of the Lib Dem energy secretary, Chris Huhne, for perverting the course of justice over a traffic offence. But apart from these minor variances, the consensus among Conservative ministers was that Starmer had their interests at heart. Once he had adapted to the political climate of the CPS, he not only set about realizing Grieve’s spending plans; he also began strengthening its role within the British security state.

Lawfare

Starmer presided over the expansion of the CPS International Division, which had been created years earlier by a Whitehall lawyer but sat mostly dormant until 2008. Its purpose was to combat ‘national security threats’ by connecting the CPS with foreign judicial institutions, allowing the former to advise the latter on prosecuting terrorism, weapons, drugs and migration offences. The rationale was that a domestic crime prevention strategy could not be confined to Britain’s borders: the CPS must work alongside the Foreign Office and intelligence services to identify ‘risks’ in faraway places and neutralize them before they reached our shores. While legal services at home were devastated by Grieve’s cuts, money poured into these overseas operations. A network of ‘Criminal Justice Advisers’ was established, stretching from Colombia to Tanzania, with the aim of exporting CPS ‘best practice’. They would instruct judicial authorities on the correct standards for prosecution, the proper relationship between lawyers and police, transparency procedures and administrative protocols. Their recommendations included refining police interview techniques and restructuring entire legal departments. The first CJAs were deployed in 2009 to former colonies Ghana and Sierra Leone, and later to the Caribbean – countries chosen for their significance in the international drug trade, as gateways through which South American cocaine is funnelled into Europe. Starmer worked to cut off trafficking routes by increasing prosecution and policing capacities in these states – which, in practice, meant propping up criminal justice systems with uniquely draconian drug laws.⁴⁵

Starmer’s remaking of the CPS as a front in the trans-national War on Drugs won plaudits from the Tory–Lib Dem cabinet. He bragged to colleagues that, for the first time in CPS history, government ministers were calling up the DPP’s office to praise its work, and offering generous subsidies for CJA deployments which advanced their overseas interests. Starmer began liaising with the National Security Agency and Specialist Operations directorate to determine where the CPS should focus its foreign efforts. From 2013 his team worked closely with the Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill, formerly NATO’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan. One of the leading members of the International Division under Starmer told me, ‘We were joined up with the government. We made sure that what we were doing was most relevant to the UK’s international objectives.’

In February 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, announced that the CPS would begin ‘building up the counter-terrorism capacity of overseas security services’ and ‘supporting prosecutors and judges to ensure that they are capable of processing terrorism cases through the court systems’.⁴⁶ This was billed as a ‘justice and human rights’ programme, but one can gauge the priority given to these principles from the countries where it operated: Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Afghanistan, among others. Starmer’s CJAs roamed these war-torn nations accompanied by a phalanx of armed guards provided by private security contractors. They offered their support to judicial authorities and security forces as the latter fought off insurrections and opposition movements. The routine practices of these states – arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, extrajudicial killings, dispersal of protests – did not deter Starmer’s roving lawyers.⁴⁷ Where such abuses were common, said Hague, the UK would not ‘disengage’ with culpable regimes, but ‘cooperate with them in a carefully controlled way while developing a more comprehensive approach to human rights adherence’ (for which read: place it on the back burner).⁴⁸

As part of this closer alignment between executive and judiciary, Starmer himself took on the responsibilities of a British diplomat. He paid official visits to countries that agreed to adopt the judicial reform packages proposed by the CPS – chairing the inaugural meeting of Sierra Leone’s criminal justice board and posing for photos with its president.⁴⁹ His willingness to be wheeled out for such ceremonial duties was ‘a huge part of promoting British soft power’ under Cameron, according to a former International Division employee, who described how Starmer also applied pressure to foreign governments that were reluctant to follow the UK’s instructions. When the Tories planned to confront organized crime in Albania, for instance, he was flown into Tirana and instructed to advise the country’s senior politicians – some of whom were thought to be involved with criminal cartels – on the importance of a robust and independent prosecution service. The irony of the DPP promoting judicial autonomy on the orders of the British government was not lost on his Albanian hosts, one of whom was so outraged by Starmer’s condescension that he almost stormed out of their meeting.

A senior CPS lawyer under Starmer remarked that his overseas strategy ‘redrew the map’ on how international prosecutors worked, compromising both their operational autonomy and their practical utility. Decisions were no longer based on the imperative to prosecute cases in the public interest, but on top-down government directives. Since high-ranking CPS staff were reluctant to send their lawyers abroad, the CJA programme was forced to hire externally, prompting an influx of prosecutors with scant knowledge of the CPS, let alone the countries to which they were dispatched. These new recruits ‘thought they were diplomats forging a brave new world’, said one CPS official. ‘But we aren’t diplomats. We’re prosecutors. And our independence as prosecutors is extremely important.’

Shortly after Starmer left the CPS, the International Division began working in Tunisia, Ethiopia, Greece, Senegal and Calais to stem the flow of refugees to Britain, as part of the Home Office drive to externalize migration controls. The Cameron government’s calculation was that the increasingly polarized debate on EU membership could be defused, and the electoral threat of UKIP diminished, if the government deterred a sufficient number of migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. Domestically, this involved the state-led harassment of asylum seekers under the ‘hostile environment’ policy. Abroad, it entailed strengthening the legal infrastructure to trap people (many of them financially destitute and facing political persecution) inside their own countries, through crackdowns on ‘people smugglers’ and ‘illegal departures’.⁵⁰ A former CPS employee described this as one of Starmer’s ‘legacy points’: ‘a result of the programme that he had developed’.

US envoy

The DPP was not only content to sacrifice prosecutors’ independence to the Cameron government; his campaign against drug users and ‘terrorists’ was also coordinated with, and bankrolled by, the Obama administration. In countries that were reluctant to accept direct American interference after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Starmer’s CPS agreed to act as a proxy – using State Department funding to push through judicial reforms that complemented the ongoing War on Terror. Two high-level CPS sources reported that Starmer struck a deal with the US Department of Justice which guaranteed that the CPS would not contravene American foreign policy interests in its overseas work. He also made a number of transatlantic trips to meet Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder – famed for providing the legal cover for US drone strikes on civilians and expanding the state’s capacity for prosecuting terrorism offences. Holder advised Starmer on how the CPS could best advance US counterterrorism objectives in Africa and the Middle East. Staffers who attended those meetings report that the two men developed a close and mutually admiring relationship.

Familiarity with Holder influenced the CPS’s domestic activities, as Starmer worked to extradite a number of suspects wanted by the American DOJ. He and Grieve appeared in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee to give evidence against Christopher Tappin, a sixty-five-year-old retired businessman who – having allegedly tried to sell thirty-five batteries to the Iranian military in violation of US sanctions – was forced to leave his chronically ill wife and spend months in a Pennsylvanian jail before being repatriated to HM Wandsworth for the remainder of his sentence.⁵¹ Starmer also worked doggedly to extradite the autistic IT expert Gary McKinnon to the United States. In 2001, McKinnon had gained access to US military databases, exploiting their surprisingly weak security systems to find information about UFOs. Although the hacker never released any of his findings to the public, the security breach was a major embarrassment for the US government, which issued an indictment that would have seen him imprisoned for up to seventy years. Starmer spoke directly to Holder’s team about the case and pledged to seal the extradition. McKinnon, whose condition made him especially reliant on his family, was hounded through the courts from 2008 to 2012, becoming increasingly depressed and suicidal as successive appeals were thrown out. Fearing that he could spend the rest of his life in Guantanamo, McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, ambushed Starmer in Westminster to plead her case:

I couldn’t understand it. Keir Starmer had written six books on human rights. I had such faith and expected so much more of him as DPP, but when I made a point of speaking to him after the session there was no trace of understanding.

‘I’m feeling very uncomfortable,’ said Mr Starmer. ‘Speaking to you is making me feel very uncomfortable.’

Did he have any idea how that sounded to me, when he was supporting the extradition of my son to some foreign hellhole?

When I told the DPP of the mental torment Gary had been living in for a decade, he responded with the same stock phrases that officialdom used: that it had been through many courts and they had all agreed that extradition should take place.⁵²

Despite Starmer’s obstinacy, he was blindsided on 16 October 2012 when the then home secretary, Theresa May, made a sudden intervention in the Commons. ‘After careful consideration of all of the relevant material,’ she said, ‘I have concluded that Mr McKinnon’s extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon’s human rights. I have therefore withdrawn the extradition order against Mr McKinnon.’ A CPS source told me that Starmer reacted to this development with fury, and immediately boarded a plane to Washington to meet with Holder’s deputies. He assured them that the CPS had no role in the Home Office decision, and pleaded that this episode should not jeopardize their future relationship. Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, reflected that ‘to extradite a man diagnosed with Asperger syndrome to America for trial would have been extraordinarily cruel and inhumane’.⁵³

Not all of Starmer’s targets were so lucky. Just two weeks before May stepped in to save McKinnon, a thirty-three-year-old Londoner named Talha Ahsan was extradited to the US on a private charter flight. Like McKinnon, Ahsan had been diagnosed with Asperger’s and deemed ‘extremely vulnerable’ by a psychiatrist. He and his contemporary Babar Ahmad were accused of having briefly run an Islamist website when they were in their early twenties. They were arrested, detained without trial – Ahsan for six years, Ahmad for eight – and denied a chance to prove their innocence. Ahsan maintained that his involvement in the website was minimal, consisting of picking up letters addressed to its PO box and storing them electronically.⁵⁴ Yet because the site was briefly registered in Connecticut, the pair were indicted in the US on terrorism offences. An international campaign was launched to oppose their extradition, garnering support from Sadiq Khan, Caroline Lucas, Gerry Conlon and Noam Chomsky among others. (Chomsky described the charges against Ahsan as ‘shallow and evasive’, arguing that ‘with the sharp deterioration of protection of elementary civil rights in the United States no one should be extradited to the country on charges related to alleged terrorism’.)⁵⁵ Ahsan and Ahmad’s supporters argued that they should stand trial in the UK rather than face the horrors of the American carceral system. There was a particular concern that, because of his condition, Ahsan would not be able to cope if placed in solitary confinement in a supermax prison. Yet Starmer was resolute. Despite the overtures of human rights groups, he refused to prosecute the duo in England, paving the way for their extradition.⁵⁶ In response, high-ranking British lawyers protested that the US was exercising ‘exorbitant jurisdiction’ over cases that should rightly be heard in the UK. They called for the introduction of a ‘forum bar’, which would give courts the power to refuse an extradition order if the UK was deemed to be the more appropriate venue for a trial. Starmer remained loyal to Holder and opposed the recommendation.⁵⁷

WikiLeaks

One of the most prominent extradition cases handled by the CPS in these years was that of Julian Assange. In 2010, Holder authorized a number of actions aimed at prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act for the crime of shedding light on American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.⁵⁸ Assange, who was then wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations in Sweden, took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum by Rafael Correa’s government. The WikiLeaks founder was willing to face questioning over the sexual assault accusations, yet he feared that were he extradited to Sweden he would be sent onwards to the US, where the courts were likely to seek the death penalty. (American intelligence services had allegedly warned their Swedish counterparts that their joint arrangements would be ‘cut off’ were Assange not handed over.)⁵⁹ His lawyers therefore proposed a solution. Before their client moved into the Ecuadorian Embassy, they asked Swedish prosecutors to question him in London. This was standard practice in such cases: if for some reason a suspect cannot return to the country where he is wanted, investigators will often travel to meet him. Failure to do so needlessly delays investigations and denies closure to alleged victims. Yet Starmer’s CPS intervened in an attempt to block this course of action, advising the Swedish authorities not to interview Assange in the UK. ‘Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition’, wrote a CPS lawyer to his Swedish counterpart. Over the next two years, the Swedish DPP, Marianne Ny, became increasingly eager to drop the case against Assange, writing to the CPS:

The time passing, the costs and how severe the crime is to be taken into account together with the intrusion or detriment to the suspect. Against this background, we have found us to be obliged to lift the detention order … and to withdraw the European arrest warrant.

But the CPS applied pressure to keep the investigation open, replying that it ‘[does] not consider costs are a relevant factor in this matter’. One British lawyer sent the following (now infamous) injunction to Ny: ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!’⁶⁰

There is little explanation for what has been described as the ‘irregular handling’ of the Assange case, other than the imperative to please Holder by facilitating the journalist’s extradition to the US via Sweden.⁶¹ Despite Starmer’s avowed commitment to greater CPS transparency, a number of sensitive files on the Assange case have either been destroyed or withheld from public view since he left office. Those that were released, thanks to tenacious Freedom of Information requests and court battles undertaken by the investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, were heavily redacted, with crucial details blotted out. Maurizi’s request to publish the correspondence between the CPS and DOJ was rejected tout court on the grounds that it would be ‘prejudicial to international relations’.⁶² In 2013 the CPS similarly rejected Assange’s request to view the personal information it had stored on him, explaining that his case was still a ‘live matter’. Yet, contradictorily, when asked to account for its mass deletion of files related to the Assange case, a CPS spokesperson stated that it was ‘not live’ after all, having ‘concluded in 2012’.⁶³

It is partly on account of these evasions that Starmer’s personal involvement in the Assange affair remains opaque. The public does not have access to his exchanges with the CPS staff who were in contact with Ny, and he has not spoken on the record about his role. Of course, it is possible that these decisions were taken by a lower-ranking bureaucrat. On the other hand, in 2009 Starmer said that he expected to be ‘regularly briefed’ on high-profile cases handled by his junior prosecutors, and we know that he personally intervened in other cases which attracted significant public interest. Starmer met Holder in Washington just days after Assange’s extradition appeal was quashed,⁶⁴ and had a private meeting with the MI5 director general, Sir Jonathan Evans, the same week the CPS rejected crucial FOI requests relating to the case.⁶⁵ Whether or not Assange’s treatment was sanctioned from on high, Starmer’s CPS was singularly responsible for his seven-year confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy, which a UN special rapporteur criticized as ‘arbitrary detention amounting to torture’.⁶⁶

Rendition

There were other cases where torture went unpunished. In 2002, a British resident, Binyam Mohamed, was arrested on unsubstantiated terrorism charges in Karachi airport while trying to return to the UK. Under the supervision of four FBI officers he was detained in a 2m by 2.5m cell, beaten repeatedly with a leather strap and hung from the ceiling for an entire week. During this time he was visited by MI5 agents who observed Mohamed’s treatment first-hand, and warned him that if he did not answer their questions he would be sent to a country where more extreme interrogation methods could be used. This is precisely what happened three months later, when the CIA transferred Mohamed to a secret prison in Morocco, where his captors repeatedly slashed his penis and chest with razor blades, burned him with hot liquid, and forced him to stay awake for forty-eight-hour periods while playing loud repetitive music.⁶⁷ MI5 continued to oversee the operation from afar, providing Mohamed’s interrogators with detailed questions about his contacts in the UK and discussing the timescale of his detention through telegram exchanges.⁶⁸ Mohamed – who was eventually released without charge after a lengthy stint in Guantanamo – produced evidence of UK involvement in his torture, sparking an investigation into one of the MI5 agents who had visited him in Pakistan. Yet Starmer announced that ‘there is insufficient evidence to prosecute’.⁶⁹ The officer walked free, and the British government paid Mohamed an undisclosed settlement for their alleged complicity in his physical and psychological mutilation. Jonathan Evans said he was ‘delighted’ with Starmer’s decision, describing the MI5 agent as ‘a dedicated public servant who has worked with skill and courage over many years to keep the people of this country safe from terrorism’.⁷⁰

Starmer also dealt with a case in which an Afghan terror suspect was allegedly tortured in Bagram Air Base under MI6’s watch. This time, investigators refused to question the other inmate who had witnessed the torture, and failed to extract statements from the US intelligence officers who had allegedly perpetrated it. But this did not stop the DPP from closing the investigation. No prosecutions were ordered; the evidence was ‘insufficient’.⁷¹

Starmer extended the same generosity to the former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who visited the UK in 2011 on the invitation of William Hague. Livni was part of the Israeli war cabinet which led the 2008 assault on Gaza, killing an estimated 1,417 Palestinians, 313 of whom were children. The actions of her administration – which cordoned off bomb sites to prevent media agencies from reporting the atrocities – were described by the UN as a ‘deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’.⁷² So when she touched down in London, members of the group Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights (with whom Starmer had been familiar during his time at Doughty Street) handed the DPP a private application for her arrest on war crimes charges. Starmer could have approved it immediately and brought Livni in for questioning. Instead, he delayed for long enough that the Foreign Office was able to issue a certificate designating Livni’s visit a ‘special mission’, during which she was immune from prosecution. Even then, it was within Starmer’s power to challenge this unprecedented and legally dubious action by pressing ahead with the application. But he was unwilling to do so. As a CPS spokesperson attested: ‘The DPP has refused to give his consent to the private prosecutor to make an application to the court for an arrest warrant. In considering this application, he has consulted the attorney general, but the decision is his.’⁷³

Police protection

Starmer’s best-known prosecutorial decisions were unrelated to his international work – much of which has scarcely been documented. His most notorious rulings, which continue to generate controversy after more than a decade, involved the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson. In 2005 de Menezes, a twenty-seven-year-old Brazilian migrant, was racially profiled by Metropolitan Police officers who mistook him for a terrorist suspect and shot him seven times in the head when he boarded the Tube at Stockwell station. Ken Macdonald approved the initial decision not to prosecute the killers, uncritically accepting a series of falsehoods issued by the Met (which went so far as to destroy incriminating evidence related to the case).⁷⁴ However, during a 2008 inquest, the police narrative was demolished by eyewitness testimony and video footage, leading the jury to reject the official claim of ‘lawful killing’.⁷⁵ The case was then sent back to Starmer. But rather than revising Macdonald’s judgement in light of the new evidence, he simply reaffirmed his predecessor’s decision. No charges were brought.⁷⁶

In 2009, Ian Tomlinson suffered a similar fate. The forty-seven-year-old newspaper vendor was trying to avoid the crowds during the G20 protests when he was randomly attacked by PC Simon Harwood, who struck him with a baton and pushed him to the ground, causing a fatal onset of internal bleeding. After more than a year of stony silence Starmer announced that Harwood, too, would not be prosecuted. This time, the DPP cited inconsistent medical evidence, despite two separate post-mortems which supported the charge of manslaughter.⁷⁷

Starmer’s decisions caused uproar. In Tomlinson’s case, the mantra of ‘insufficient evidence’ was arguably borne out. Two years after his death, reams of expert testimony eventually forced Starmer to reverse his ruling. Harwood was tried and found not guilty by a jury, though he was sacked from the force for gross misconduct. Far from vindicating Starmer’s reluctance to bring charges, however, the acquittal highlights one of the main problems with Britain’s legal culture: the self-affirming assumption that a jury will not convict uniformed officers. If police are barely ever brought to trial, the perception that they are above the law is entrenched – and those that are placed in the dock are held to a lower standard. As DPP, Starmer was in a unique position to redress this imbalance by treating police as ordinary citizens: pursuing them with the same urgency and vigour he would bring to any other case of daylight lynching. But instead, he fell in line: dragging his heels over the investigations, finding arbitrary reasons to forego prosecution, refusing to challenge the Met’s falsehoods – and, by extension, green-lighting other bellicose officers.

Starmer’s CPS took the same approach to the death of Jimmy Mubenga, an Angolan migrant who died in 2010 when three security guards hired by the Home Office used lethal force to prevent him from leaving his deportation flight – holding him down in his chair in such a manner that his breathing was cut off. The CPS reviewing lawyer ordered that the killers should not be charged, and Starmer approved the decision despite a subsequent inquest which found that their actions were unlawful.⁷⁸ The same year, a retrospective investigation revealed that Blair Peach had been killed by members of the Met’s Special Patrol Group, who had shattered his skull while he was taking part in an anti-racist demonstration in 1979. Yet again, Starmer claimed there was no evidence to charge the officers.⁷⁹ As disproportionate numbers of BAME people continued to die in police custody, he made a fleeting attempt to establish a Deaths in Custody Community Engagement Panel; but it never got off the ground, and the initiative was quietly dropped.⁸⁰

It remains impossible to calculate how many police officers were granted immunity by Starmer, but dozens would be a cautious estimate. This was largely due to his handling of the ‘spycops’ scandal: a story that stretches back to the Met’s infiltration of left-wing groups in 1968. That year, an undercover police unit was established to combat ‘subversives’ in the anti–Vietnam War movement. At the turn of the millennium, a newer variant of the operation set out to tackle ‘domestic extremists’ – primarily socialists, environmentalists and anti-racists, whose organizations were flooded with informants during the Blair era. As DPP, Starmer worked alongside the CPS national coordinator for domestic extremism, Nick Paul, whom he had befriended years earlier during their days at Doughty Street Chambers (which Paul helped to co-found). It was Paul’s responsibility to advise police on their covert investigations and oversee the activities of undercover agents.⁸¹ Revelations about spycops’ activities began to surface in the media in summer 2010, when it came to light that multiple officers had formed long-term sexual relationships with women on whom they were spying (including the McLibel defendant Helen Steel). In one case, a policeman married a young environmental campaigner and fathered two children with her while continually reporting back to his senior officers about her political work.⁸²

Undercover cops would frequently incite the most drastic and confrontational forms of activism in order to entrap their targets.⁸³ But such tactics backfired when Mark Kennedy – an officer who had manipulated multiple women into romantic relationships during his seven years under-cover – hatched a plan to occupy Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station along with a group of climate campaigners. Before the action could take place, police swooped in and detained 114 activists: the largest pre-emptive arrest in UK history. Twenty of them were convicted in December 2010 and a further six were due to stand trial the following month. Starmer’s CPS concealed the fact that these cases were built on evidence given by Kennedy.⁸⁴ It turned out that the undercover agent had made tape recordings that exonerated the final six defendants, but crown prosecutors failed to disclose this information to the court.⁸⁵ Catching wind of this malfeasance, the defence demanded the release of the tapes, and the CPS was forced to drop the charges. Starmer travelled to Nottingham Crown Court where the trial was taking place to deal with the media fallout. Once Kennedy’s actions were made public, all the convictions that resulted from his unlawful spying – at least forty-nine of them – were quashed.

The CPS claimed, implausibly, that the collapse of the Ratcliffe trial was due to previously unavailable evidence which had no connection to ‘the existence of an undercover officer’.⁸⁶ Nonetheless, Starmer responded to the revelations about Kennedy by commissioning Sir Christopher Rose to produce an ‘independent report’ on undercover policing. Rose happened to be the UK’s chief surveillance commissioner, responsible for authorizing the deployment of undercover officers, which meant that the inquiry amounted to a self-investigation. Yet, mindful that this procedure might not be enough to seal the desired outcome, Starmer also made sure to limit the scope of the report, confining its remit to the Ratcliffe episode. Rose was not allowed to question the CPS’s overall approach to covert policing nor examine other recent cases in which Kennedy was involved. Because of these provisos, the final product was widely considered a fraud (or, in the words of one spycops victim, ‘a perfect guide to the anatomy of a whitewash’).⁸⁷ It laid the blame for failing to disclose evidence with a single prosecutor – although it also stated that his actions were ‘not deliberate, still less dishonest’ – and denied that the case illustrated any institutional failures.⁸⁸

Starmer reportedly released the Rose document to news outlets just half an hour before he had agreed to take questions on it. He appeared on Channel 4 News and BBC2’s Newsnight to announce that there had been no ‘systemic’ failure at the CPS, even though the limits he placed on the Rose inquiry made such a determination impossible – and past cases suggested that the Kennedy incident was representative of a broader trend.⁸⁹ The news anchor Jon Snow asked Starmer whether, in light of the Ratcliffe scandal, the CPS should now commission a wider inquiry to root out further miscarriages of justice. After all, he said, if Kennedy alone was responsible for forty-nine false judgements, how many other spycops victims were still languishing in jail? Shouldn’t the CPS re-examine each case in which it had relied on undercover officers to secure convictions? Starmer replied that ‘it would be a better use of our time and resources to look when an issue is raised rather than look back at everything when Sir Christopher Rose has said there’s no systemic problem’.⁹⁰ This line went largely unchallenged. Yet there was an obvious problem with Starmer’s logic. The CPS could not ‘look when an issue is raised’, because nobody was in a position to raise such issues: Starmer would not tell the public which cases were built on spycops’ evidence.

Commentators at the time remarked upon the paucity of source material in the Rose report. Rose interviewed Ian Cunningham, the CPS lawyer prosecuting the Ratcliffe case, whom he criticized for failing to hand over evidence. But he did not bother to speak to Cunningham’s superiors nor seek the testimony of Nick Paul, the most senior CPS lawyer to work closely with Kennedy, who was personally involved in the Ratcliffe case, according to a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.⁹¹ Despite police documents which proved that Ratcliffe was the subject of ‘high level’ CPS discussions, Rose based his findings exclusively on interviews with junior and peripheral figures. ‘Why did the forensic minds of Keir Starmer and Sir Christopher Rose never think to question Nick Paul?’ asked the journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan in 2012. Because of these wilful oversights, she wrote, ‘there have been no convictions of officers, there has been no support for victims (not even the women with whom officers formed sexual relationships), there have been no rule changes, no apologies, and no admissions of wrongdoing beyond individual failings’.⁹² Campaigners spent years pushing for a proper review of the spycops programme that would expose its institutional mechanisms and grant justice to its victims. Starmer could have provided this. Instead, his actions followed the standard sequence described by the Ratcliffe activist Olly Knowles: ‘announce an inquiry, choose the narrowest possible remit, and find someone friendly to write it’.⁹³

‘False accusations’

Surveying the rest of Starmer’s DPP record, one might wonder whether he has a particular blind-spot on women’s issues. From 2011 to 2014, the number of people charged with rape by the CPS declined by 14 per cent, despite a 3 per cent rise in reported rapes over that period.⁹⁴ (There was a similar drop in the number of domestic violence cases referred to the crown, which fell by 7,000 between 2012 and 2013.⁹⁵) Starmer promised to launch an inquiry into the figures, but the reasons for them were transparent. In 2011 he had issued new charging guidance on rape cases which enhanced the power of police to determine the credibility of victims. In previous years, the CPS instructed police to refer rape cases to state prosecutors at an early stage of the investigation: a vital measure to ensure that victims’ complaints were given a fair hearing. But under Starmer the CPS scrapped this protocol, issuing fresh advice that ‘emphasised the police’s role in stopping all cases that do not meet evidential tests before referring to the CPS for charging’, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The guidance stated that ‘Police decision makers have an important role in identifying and stopping cases where the Full Code Test cannot be met … The police should take decisions to no further action cases before referral unless the decision requires the assessment of complex evidence or legal issues.’⁹⁶ This reform, along with Grieve’s swingeing budget cuts, caused the number of rape cases referred to the CPS to fall by a third over a two-year period.The Independent reported in early 2014 that thousands of cases had been ‘wrongly discontinued’ as a result.⁹⁷ Starmer’s CPS also weakened guidelines that previously required specialist barristers to deal with every stage of a rape prosecution, in a move that was attacked by Labour politicians and feminist campaigners. The former solicitor general Vera Baird stated that, because of Starmer’s new guidance, the ‘whole drive towards specially trained barristers for rape cases risks losing momentum and going into reverse. This is really shocking news.’⁹⁸ To his credit, in 2009 the DPP attempted to reinforce the ‘merits-based’ approach to rape prosecutions, which required CPS lawyers to pursue such cases without considering the biases and stereotypes that may influence a jury’s decision about the plaintiff. Yet this step towards redressing institutionalized sexism at the CPS was of little benefit as long as rape cases were never referred to prosecutors in the first place.

In 2010, the campaign group Women Against Rape met Starmer to discuss a related matter: the CPS practice of prosecuting women accused of lying about sexual assault. The campaigners pointed out that, given the huge number of rape cases that are dropped each year due to biases in the legal system, it was unwise to prosecute people for making ‘false accusations’. To do so meant that women who had suffered these crimes could be charged for ‘lying’, simply because they could not meet the evidential threshold needed to convict their assailants. The activists drew Starmer’s attention to a number of cases which, in their view, proved that the current legal protocols weren’t fit for purpose. In one instance, a fifteen-year-old girl had been raped by an older man who, she claimed, had ejaculated on her T-shirt. The police tested the T-shirt, found no sperm, and charged the girl for making false allegations. She was set to be convicted for deceiving the CPS before a second forensic test vindicated her original claim.

The representatives of Women Against Rape told Starmer that ‘the prosecution of disbelieved victims skews police investigations and undermines women’s ability to report rape’. They argued that, just as Starmer had ruled it was not in the public interest to prosecute facilitators of assisted suicide, he should set a similar precedent in ‘false accusation’ cases. The DPP refused.⁹⁹ Instead, he proposed a compromise: he would personally review all such cases over a seventeen-month period and produce a report based on his findings.

During this period Starmer elected to prosecute thirty-five people for making allegations of rape, six for making allegations of domestic violence and three for making allegations of both. The report does not provide full commentaries on each case, but two of its examples appear to legitimize the concerns of Women Against Rape. In one of them, a woman alleged that she had met a man in a nightclub and later got into his car along with two other passengers. She claimed that the driver had stopped the vehicle, whereupon one of the passengers had pinned her down and raped her. She was then forcibly removed and left on the side of the road. One of the passengers took a video on his phone which showed the woman being manhandled out of the car, while the other men can be heard asking her – apropos of nothing – whether they have ‘done anything to her’. The woman replies that they have not. On the basis of that video, Starmer prosecuted the woman for making ‘false accusations’. In a second synoptic case study, a twenty-year-old man told his mother that he was raped by another man. When she reported this to the police, they interviewed the alleged victim and concluded that he was ‘struggling to come to terms with his sexuality’. The complainant told them he had made the accusation because ‘he had felt guilt, shame and depression’ about being gay. Starmer charged him with perverting the course of justice. The DPP cited such cases to argue that false rape accusations should be ‘dealt with robustly’, pledging that the Crown Prosecution Service would ‘prosecute these cases wherever there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to do so’.¹⁰⁰

Shock and awe

On matters of public order, police fared better than protesters in Starmer’s CPS. The former were protected, the latter vigorously pursued. During the 2009 demonstrations against the G20, a group of eleven performance artists called the ‘Space Hijackers’ appeared in central London dressed in boiler suits, lingerie and riot helmets. Starmer charged them with impersonating police officers and tried to jail them for three months.¹⁰¹ The CPS also prosecuted the thirty-one-year-old protester Harvie Brown for ‘violent disorder’, carrying a maximum sentence of five years. Brown’s offence was to peacefully remonstrate with police officers who had kettled him and then struck him repeatedly with batons, inflicting two head injuries and a broken tooth. The defendant was acquitted by a jury in under thirty minutes.¹⁰² The following year, the CPS targeted anti–tuition fee protesters during the student movement, slapping charges of violent disorder on behaviour that included stealing a policeman’s hat, climbing the Cenotaph, and throwing a placard onto an empty street. At a demonstration in December 2010, a philosophy student, Alfie Meadows, was assaulted by a police officer who hit him so hard with a truncheon that he had to undergo emergency brain surgery. While the officer escaped without charge, Meadows himself was prosecuted for violent disorder. After two trials returned inconclusive verdicts, Meadows’s lawyers wrote directly to Starmer begging him to drop the case. Starmer declined, and the defendant was brought to trial for a third time. Like Brown, he was finally acquitted on all counts.¹⁰³

In the aftermath of these incidents, Starmer drew up prosecution guidelines that made it easier for the CPS to prosecute peaceful protesters. He wrote that the ‘potential for a number of protests over the coming years’ had heightened the need to target ‘disruptive’ activists who turn up to demonstrations ‘anticipating trouble or disorder’. How were prosecutors to distinguish these troublemakers from the rest of the crowd? Starmer set out the criteria. First, if ‘significant disruption was caused to the public and businesses’, then CPS lawyers were encouraged to take action, so effective forms of protest were criminalized from the outset. Second, anyone carrying a weapon should be held accountable. On the surface this seemed a sensible provision – but as the legal scholar Nadine El-Enany pointed out, Starmer did not explain what constitutes ‘a weapon’, so police and prosecutors were given the latitude to construe anything from placards to drinks flasks as such.¹⁰⁴ Third, anyone who made ‘threats … against an individual or business’ which ‘could have caused alarm, fear or distress’ would be targeted, which turned direct action against politicians or corporations into a prosecutable offence. If the suspect had ‘a previous history of causing … disruption or making threats at public protests’, this would count against them; so seasoned activists had reason to be wary. Lastly, Starmer wrote that those who took ‘steps to conceal their identity’ or wore ‘items that could be considered body protection’ were more likely to be charged.¹⁰⁵

Starmer took the same hardline stance on the 2011 riots, as thousands flooded the streets following the killing of Mark Duggan by Met officers. The unrest began on 6 August, and by the following month almost 4,000 people had been arrested.¹⁰⁶ This was a turning point for the Cameron government, which seized upon the discontent to justify its austerity programme. The coalition’s spending policies were not just presented as an attempt to streamline the state or rebalance the public finances. They were part of a project of ethical rejuvenation which extended across the various wings of government, from the education sector to the criminal justice system. It would not be an exaggeration to say that ‘punishment’ was the overarching framework for this programme: identifying and disciplining the morally aberrant, whether through Iain Duncan Smith’s sanctions on benefit-seekers or Michael Gove’s disciplinary reforms in the classroom. The response to the August disturbances played an important role in normalizing this punitive vocabulary. Cameron told the rioters, ‘You will feel the full force of the law. And if you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment.’¹⁰⁷

Starmer, who by this time had developed an amicable relationship with the coalition cabinet, was duty-bound to act as the government’s punisher-in-chief. Yet he set about this task with more zeal and less scruple than the subsequent media billing would suggest. Two decades after his polemic on the criminalization of the Wapping strike, Starmer led a similar crackdown on working-class communities. When the riots broke out, he promptly spoke to Grieve and liaised with the government’s crisis response committee to agree a joint strategy, establishing a special CPS unit to deal exclusively with riot cases. One of his senior prosecutors warned that those on the streets would ‘see the shock and awe of the criminal justice system’. By early October, 1,984 suspects had been charged in relation to the disorder. The CPS adopted a blanket policy of pressing serious charges ‘in all but the most exceptional of circumstances’, which meant working with police to jail people who, in any other situation, would not have been prosecuted – including one defendant who stole a small box of doughnuts, and another who was given a stolen pair of shorts by someone else. The legal scholars Carly Lightowlers and Hannah Quirk explained how the CPS ensured that normal prosecution standards were dispensed with for riot cases:

The police were given a draft form of words to include in the incomplete files they sent to the CPS … They were told to explain that the on-going nature of the disorder and the strain on police resources meant that enquiries could not be completed within the time limits and to recommend that charging decisions should be based on [a] lower standard.¹⁰⁸

Starmer demanded twenty-four-hour court sittings with no pause on weekends to increase the rate of convictions, and made a personal appearance at 4am in Highbury Magistrates Court to boost morale. Senior legal figures described these special hearings as ‘kangaroo courts’ and ‘conveyor-belt justice ‘, with one defence lawyer observing that, ‘They were bringing 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds into court at two or three o’clock in the morning … How are they meant to understand what I’m saying and understand what they have to do, understand what the evidence was and what was going to happen to them?’ Young defendants were sometimes separated from their parents and denied food or water. The judgements handed down were swift and brutal.¹⁰⁹

A Tottenham-based solicitor recalled that many children ‘were remanded in custody on the basis of no evidence, with the judges rubber stamping prosecution applications and all but ignoring the safeguards of the Bail Act’. Starmer claimed that prosecutors had not been instructed to uniformly oppose bail applications, yet he defended the decision to keep defendants in detention while the riots were still ongoing, and conceded that the CPS had been ‘co-ordinating with the police’ for this purpose.¹¹⁰ His assertion that there was no blanket policy to refuse bail was apparently contradicted by a leaked Met document, which stated that ‘a strategic decision has been made … that in all cases an application will be made for remand in custody both at the police station, and later at court’.¹¹¹ Denying bail as pre-emptive or informal punishment is prohibited by British law, yet Starmer seemed willing to overlook this technicality. Equally, when deciding whether to prosecute minors, a youth offender specialist is usually required to review the case – but this protocol was dropped during the riots.¹¹²

The following July, Starmer told the Guardian that his approach to the riots favoured quick prosecutions over extended jail terms (‘Rapid riot prosecutions more important than long sentences, says Keir Starmer’, read the headline.)¹¹³ This was a dissimulation. In fact, as one commentator noted, ‘Starmer’s role as DPP during the prosecutions of the 2011 rioters appears to be that of pushing for rapid prosecutions, which diminished due process, and heavier sentences’.¹¹⁴ The DPP increased the severity of punishments in two ways. First, he made the unusual decision to relocate trials from magistrates’ courts to crown courts. The former can issue a maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment for summary cases; the latter can dispense life sentences. Before the riots, CPS guidance stated that non-residential burglary should be prosecuted summarily in the magistrates’ court; but in August 2011 Starmer changed this provision to ensure that those who stole small and inexpensive items from high-street shops were dragged before the crown court for harsher sentencing. His guidelines also encouraged magistrates to refer cases to the crown court if they felt that their own sentencing powers were inadequate.¹¹⁵ This ensured the courts’ ability to issue disproportionate punishments was not hamstrung by legal convention.

Second, Starmer had to decide whether the main offence related to the riots – stealing from commercial premises – should be charged as theft or burglary. Theft had a maximum sentence of seven years, while burglary carried ten. He advised that burglary offences should be slapped onto other public order charges so as to increase the likely jail time. CPS guidance stated that even those who could not be proven to have taken part in the public disorder should also be charged with burglary rather than theft, ‘to reflect the unwarranted invasion of another’s property and the serious context of the offence’.¹¹⁶ This ratcheting up of the severity level issued in a series of tragicomic incidents that were picked up by the national papers. A twenty-two-year-old Portuguese man who had not participated in the riots was walking past a ransacked ice cream shop when he decided, on a whim, to help himself to a scoop of coffee gelato. He took one lick, didn’t like the flavour, and abandoned it on the street outside. He was jailed for sixteen months and set to be deported back to Portugal, where he had not lived since he was a child.¹¹⁷ Another man in his early twenties received a two-year prison sentence for wandering into an unlocked Quality Save shop and stealing a small quantity of skincare oil.¹¹⁸ Ken Macdonald described such rulings as a ‘collective loss of proportion’, lacking ‘humanity or justice’.¹¹⁹

’Cheats’ and phone hackers

After aiding Cameron’s bullish approach to moral uplift, Starmer proceeded to channel one of its key narratives: the demonization of welfare claimants. As with riot suspects, Starmer altered CPS guidelines so that those who had misclaimed small amounts of social welfare could be prosecuted by the crown courts. He also advised prosecutors to charge ‘benefit cheats’ under the Fraud Act, which carries a maximum sentence of ten years (Emily Thorn-berry, the Islington MP who would later run against Starmer for Labour leader, argued it should be increased to fourteen). When announcing these changes, Starmer parroted the rhetoric of the Tories. ‘It is a myth that “getting one over on the system” is a victimless crime’, he said.

The cost to the nation incurred by benefit fraud should be at the forefront of lawyers’ minds when considering whether a prosecution is in the public interest. It is vital that we take a tough stance on this type of fraud and I am determined to see a clampdown on those who flout the system … Indeed, prosecutors are also instructed not to shy away from using a range of legislation that carries higher sentences where it is merited.¹²⁰

Some have claimed that Starmer’s guidance was aimed at ‘organised criminal elements’ rather than individual claimants.¹²¹ But it is beyond dispute that ordinary people have been given harsh sentences for ‘over-claiming’. (A single mother from Hull, for instance, had her eligibility for child benefits altered when her new partner moved in with her part-time; she reported her change of circumstance to her local authority rather than the Department for Work and Pensions, and was sent to jail for this mistake.¹²²) Yet even if Starmer’s hoped-for ten-year sentences were rarely a reality, the effect of the new guidelines on perceptions of welfare claimants should not be understated. The year Starmer’s reform took effect, the amount of taxpayers’ money lost to benefit fraud was approximately £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of total benefits expenditure.¹²³ By contrast, HMRC’s conservative estimate put the figure lost to tax evasion and avoidance at £7.1 billion during the same period.¹²⁴ That Starmer refused to mention this ‘cost to the nation’ was not only a stark indication of where his sympathies lay; it was also a factor in cultivating the public antipathy towards ‘scroungers’ that enabled George Osborne’s cutbacks.

Starmer’s approach to protesters and benefits claimants tallied with his support for a government ‘superdatabase’ that would collect all phone and internet communications: a useful complement to the systems of monitoring and surveillance that accompanied the Tories’ welfare reforms. He lobbied for the adoption of the so-called Snooper’s Charter, which handed the government and security services unfettered access to private data, creating a legal obligation for communication service providers – including phone networks and social media sites – to record the activities of their users and disclose them to the state. Starmer appeared in front of a parliamentary committee in October 2012 to discuss these reforms.¹²⁵ When the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, expressed concern about their impact on civil liberties, the DPP pleaded with him to change his mind. ‘I would go so far as to say that communications data is so important,’ Starmer wrote to Clegg, ‘that any reduction in capability would create a real risk to future prosecutions.’¹²⁶

It was not only surveillance by the state that Starmer supported. The DPP took steps to ingratiate himself with the Murdoch press throughout his time in office, receiving hospitality from editors, attending the Times Christmas drinks party, and arranging a private lunch with the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, shortly after his appointment in 2008.¹²⁷ When stories first emerged that News of the World had engaged in illegal phone hacking to access private communications, Starmer did not authorize the prosecution of senior journalists. The CPS was in possession of evidence that directly implicated NOTW staff in criminal activity, but on three separate occasions Starmer refused to investigate the accusations or examine the relevant case files. He told the Leveson Inquiry that he accepted ‘at face value’ Met assistant commissioner John Yates’s judgement that no such investigation was needed – even though Yates was known to be a close friend of NOTW’s deputy editor, Neil Wallis, and had come to this conclusion after reviewing 11,000 pages of documents on NOTW in precisely eight hours.¹²⁸ On 16 July 2009, Starmer was shown private correspondence which proved that phone hacking was routine company procedure at the newspaper – yet he decided that the evidence would not be examined and no charges would be brought.¹²⁹ He stuck to this position until the summer of 2012, when a number of civil cases and media reports unearthed the evidence that Starmer had failed to review. At that point the DPP was forced to initiate proceedings against NOTW employees including Andy Coulson, who had since been hired as Cameron’s communications director. Starmer was censured by a parliamentary select committee for his failure to conduct a proper investigation at an earlier stage. The MPs’ official report concluded that he and Yates ‘both bear culpability for failing to ensure that the evidence held by the Metropolitan Police was properly investigated in the years afterwards, given all the opportunities to do so, and that the sufficiency of the evidence was not reviewed by the CPS’.¹³⁰

The modernizer

The summer before Starmer was due to leave the CPS, he took a final trip to meet Eric Holder, who ‘paid him an enormous tribute’ according to a staffer present at the discussion. Holder also requested one last favour. Based on his experience of the past five years, Starmer was asked to draft notes on the strengths and weaknesses of the DOJ, pinpointing its organizational flaws and suggesting possible fixes. After the meeting, his colleagues observed that the CPS – for years a notoriously backward and dysfunctional institution – had now become a model for its American counterparts. Starmer concurred that this was something to be proud of. The following April he officially announced his resignation. Grieve gave a eulogizing speech at his leaving party, telling journalists that the outgoing DPP had ‘brought sound instinct and humanity to his role’.¹³¹

Aspects of Starmer’s DPP tenure remain uncertain. How much did he know about Nick Paul’s ‘counter-extremism’ work? What was the extent of his involvement in the Assange case? Did he discuss the fate of Binyam Mohamed or other victims of state torture with his contacts in the intelligence agencies? Starmer refuses to publicly address these questions. Regardless, the above account of his legal career yields insights which are key to understanding his subsequent activities in parliament. For one thing, despite his overtures to the Labour Left in early 2020, Sir Keir’s record shows his evolution into an unabashed authoritarian. As a young lawyer from a Labour-voting family, he dedicated significant time and energy to liberal causes, using his natural diligence to win a number of worthy cases against powerful interests. But from the outset he kept his distance from his more radical peers in the Haldane Society. As they saw it, his identification with socialists and environmentalists was always secondary to his ambition and the conformist reflexes that came with it. When he got the chance to realize this ambition by working with the Northern Irish police force, he dispensed not only with his earlier left-leaning convictions, but also with his prioritization of human rights. ‘That really exposed me, for five years, to working on the inside of an organization’, he said of the NIPB role. ‘I came better to understand how you can change by being inside and getting the trust of people.’¹³²

Cultivating this political adaptability was perfect preparation for the DPP job. Friends and colleagues who have known Starmer since he was a junior barrister say that he sees himself primarily as a ‘modernizer’ – capable of streamlining institutions by implementing the most efficient protocols. This was the spirit he brought to the CPS, determined to complete Macdonald’s reforms and take it on ‘a journey into the 21st century’.¹³³ But because his arrival coincided with the era of austerity, his ability to establish new departments or promote legal advocacy was compromised. Amid the cutbacks, the government was most willing to assist the CPS, financially and operationally, on projects that benefited its security interests. The main avenue for institutional development – where Starmer could make his mark – involved close collaboration with the Tories, the intelligence agencies, and their allies across the Atlantic. Working hand-in-glove with the security services, the DPP lost whatever progressive instincts he once had, especially where foreign policy or civil liberties were concerned. He began to identify with ‘a strong statist tradition’, according to a former colleague, believing in the ‘effective use of the criminal justice system to provide for an effective state’.¹³⁴ As Andrew Murray observes, ‘It is wrong to say that it is unclear what Starmer stands for. He stands for the state, its servants, its perquisites and their protection from the toils of democracy.’¹³⁵

As such, the widespread notion that Starmer is a political outsider – with no experience in this domain before his election to parliament in 2015 – is mistaken. Actually, Starmer spent much of his time as DPP advancing the government’s overseas agenda, negotiating with world leaders on its behalf, rewriting CPS guidelines to complement its domestic programme, and shielding its allies from investigation. He acted as a Cameron–Osborne mouthpiece on issues from welfare entitlements to public order. Sir Keir may not identify with the Conservatives; his upbringing instilled a tribal affiliation to Labour, an instinctive hostility to Thatcher and an inchoate aversion to social injustice (which we will explore at greater length in chapter four). But by 2010 he had nonetheless embraced a right-wing statist-Atlanticism that was more or less aligned with the coalition’s interests, completing the journey from underdog defence lawyer to decorated Knight of the Realm.¹³⁶

Accompanying this transition was a growing bureaucratic mentality, developed at the CPS and then transplanted to the political sphere. Starmer’s attitude to the organization was often hyper-meticulous; his administrative changes were based on mass consultations, data-gathering exercises, step-by-step procedures and painstakingly formulated codes of conduct. His approach was more rigorous and granular than that of his predecessors, and colleagues were impressed by his unremitting work ethic. Yet masked by this professionalism was a lack of confidence that would come to the fore a decade later, at the apex of his political career. Starmer’s technocratic method compensated for an inability to make swift or definitive decisions, allowing him to hide behind official processes and delegate difficult judgements. In reforming the CPS’s relationship with the Bar, for instance, he was more comfortable pursuing a slow and managerial strategy than the confrontational one favoured by Macdonald. Caution was his watchword – a fine quality in a lawyer, but less attractive in a politician. As we shall see, this stunted capacity for decision-making has conditioned his reliance on advisers, focus groups and ‘listening exercises’ as Labour leader.

Starmer’s flexible approach to facts has also been carried over into his new profession. The prosecutor famously told journalists that he opposed harsh sentences in response to the 2011 riots, when in fact he had taken concrete steps to increase their severity. He assured the public that he had commissioned a ‘thorough’ examination of phone hacking evidence, when he had requested only a partial and inadequate review. He went on to claim that he had ‘taken on the Murdoch press for phone hacking’, despite being reprimanded by MPs for his failure to do so. He asserted that the ‘independent’ Rose report had refuted accusations of a systemic problem with spycops, when in fact it was a patent whitewash. Such distortions were not only intended to shield the CPS from criticism. They were also aimed at protecting Starmer’s reputation, so that once he quit as DPP he could prepare to enter parliament. From 2008 to 2013, CPS decisions that would normally be announced by anonymous spokespeople were instead broadcast at major press conferences fronted by Starmer. The lawyer carefully controlled his media image, such that by the end of his term newspapers frequently referred to him as ‘Britain’s fairest man’. In the following chapters, we will see how this aptitude for self-fashioning aided his political elevation.

2
The Politician

Starmer began speaking to the Labour leadership about running for parliament months before he left the CPS. He returned to private practice, working for the Business Crime Unit of the law firm Mishcon de Reya, which assists private companies facing fraud accusations.¹ He was simultaneously hired by Ed Miliband to chair Labour’s ‘Victims’ Taskforce’, set up to review how victims of crime are treated by the justice system. With Frank Dobson planning to step down as the MP for the safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras after thirty-six years, Starmer was told to make himself visible at local fundraisers and community events. As insiders briefed that he would stand at the next election, he took to the airwaves to praise Miliband and fulminate against HS2. There was a moment of doubt when Labour officials realized that, according to the rulebook, Starmer had not been a party member for long enough to run as a parliamentary candidate. But Labour HQ intervened to delay the selection process so that this criterion was met.² Starmer sailed to victory in the May 2015 election, beating his Tory opponent by a hefty 17,000 votes.

The same election saw Labour lose twenty-six seats and the Conservatives win an outright majority. Miliband resigned and was temporarily replaced by Harriet Harman while the party geared up for a leadership contest. Less than a week after he entered parliament, Starmer was exhorted to stand for the top job. An online #keirforleader campaign set up by the director of a private equity firm garnered support from Polly Toynbee, the city financier Paul Myners and a handful of centrist MPs. Yet Starmer shot down the suggestion, telling colleagues that someone with more experience was needed.³ He threw his weight behind Andy Burnham, the health secretary under Gordon Brown, who signalled his political direction by launching his leadership campaign in the headquarters of an accountancy firm famous for facilitating large-scale tax avoidance.⁴ Burnham’s politics were consistent with Starmer’s DPP record. The candidate had backed further cuts to social welfare (asserting that Labour must not be ‘soft on people who want something for nothing’), praised NATO, supported mass surveillance laws and defended the War on Terror.⁵ 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.

With the leadership campaign underway, Starmer joined Burnham in abstaining on the Tory Welfare Bill: a raft of brutal cuts to social spending that disproportionately targeted women, children and disabled people.⁶ Corbyn was the only leadership contender to oppose the measures, leading a group of forty-eight Labour rebels to vote against them. The Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, publicly asked Starmer how, as a human rights lawyer, he could support legislation that breached the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by allowing children to go hungry. Starmer replied that although the bill was likely to have an ‘adverse impact on child poverty’, it ‘also includes measures to support more apprentices and measures to support the troubled families programme. Although these measures do not go far enough, Labour should support them in principle.’⁷

Corbyn won the leadership in a landslide that September, capitalizing on widespread frustration with the Tory-lite brand embraced by his opponents, and contrasting it with a traditional social democratic programme based on public ownership, wealth taxes, free university tuition and investment in health and education. Having received a resounding mandate from the membership (59.5 per cent of first preference votes compared with Burnham’s 19 per cent), much of the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) immediately began briefing about the prospect of mass resignations and no-confidence motions. The shadow health minister Jamie Reed resigned within minutes of the result and was followed by several other frontbenchers. Starmer, however, struck a somewhat different note. ‘We have to respect the result here,’ he said. ‘To say you’re resigning straight away, without even giving Jeremy the chance to show he will handle things, I don’t think is right.’⁸ Emily Thornberry was another conciliatory voice, asserting that ‘there’s no room for sulking’, and welcoming Corbyn’s potential to ‘bring a London perspective to some issues’.⁹

Whereas most of the MPs who launched their political careers under Blair and Brown were set on non-cooperation with Corbyn, the newer crop of politicians including Starmer was less outwardly hostile. This group – often described as the ‘soft Left’, Milibandian, drawn from London-based law firms and liberal NGOs – responded to the change of leadership with more confusion than enmity. ‘All that’s happened is that we have opened up a space,’ said Starmer. ‘Jeremy has opened up a seam, a rich seam of disaffection, disengagement with politics. People want to come back in now and engage. And that’s a really good thing.’ Yet the former DPP continued to play to Corbyn-sceptics on the reasonable assumption that this opening would not last long. At a Labour conference fringe event co-organized by the Tory think tank Bright Blue, he criticized Corbyn’s politics as insular and encouraged the party to ‘think past austerity’, which he described as a ‘2015 issue’. He also gently mocked the membership’s enthusiasm for its new premier: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he would be the first to say he doesn’t have all the answers, and if you touch Jeremy you are not healed.’¹⁰

Shadow minister

Given the scale of right-wing Labour opposition to the Corbyn leadership, and its need to make alliances with anyone who was willing, Starmer’s lukewarm comments earned him the position of shadow Home Office minister with portfolio for immigration, working under Burnham as shadow home secretary. Although staffers from the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (LOTO) knew that Starmer did not share their politics, his public recognition and popularity with the PLP made him a useful ally – as did his ability to bring a lawyer’s eye to legislation. On account of his familiarity with the Snooper’s Charter, Starmer was asked to lead Labour’s response to the surveillance law when an altered version was brought back to parliament in November 2015. He exchanged a number of letters with the junior Home Office minister John Hayes, promising to secure Labour’s support for the bill so long as there was an independent review of the bulk powers it authorized.¹¹ After a public outcry over the charter’s attack on privacy rights (which Liberty described as ‘the most intrusive mass surveillance regime of any democratic country’¹²), Starmer and Burnham co-authored a letter to Theresa May requesting additional safeguards and the repeal of a provision that allowed the government to monitor trade union activity.¹³ May agreed, and the opposition helped to vote it through.

Starmer’s approach to the charter prefigured his Labour leadership style, in that he was above all eager to demonstrate ‘constructive engagement’ with the Conservatives. ‘Surveillance legislation fit for the twenty-first century is a prize worth fighting for,’ he remarked at the time, ‘and Labour will work constructively with the government to achieve it.’¹⁴ He took a similar stance on bombing Syria when David Cameron brought the proposal to parliament in December 2015. Although Starmer voted against the air-strikes, he pledged that he would reconsider his position and work with the government were it willing to mount a fuller intervention including ‘a ground force’.¹⁵

From late 2015 to early 2016, Starmer carried out the shadow immigration brief by presenting a number of cautious, procedural questions to the Home Office, on the robustness of the ‘eBorders’ system, the date on which the government’s ‘annual asylum strategy’ would be published, how many people on the national ‘Warnings Index’ had entered the country over the past five years, and so on. He gave an effective speech on the condition of migrants in Yarl’s Wood detention centre and called on the government to review its approach to reuniting refugee families. But behind the scenes he attempted to push Labour into supporting stronger border controls. In the run-up to the June 2016 Brexit vote, Starmer and Burnham went on a three-month ‘immigration listening tour’ of thirty British towns and cities, speaking to ‘communities, businesses and trade unionists’ about their views on freedom of movement.¹⁶ During this consultation process, Starmer developed a position on EU membership that broadly aligned with Cameron’s: enthusiastic support for Remain, tempered by a hope that Britain could opt out of liberal migration policies. His main reason for supporting EU membership, he told the Independent, was concern about the ‘practical, operational’ impact of disentangling Britain from European judicial and security agencies.¹⁷

Yet his views on migration hardened after 24 June, when the referendum result sent shock waves through the political class: 52 per cent of voters backed Leave, in defiance of pollsters’ predictions. As the results came in, Starmer was one of several Remainer MPs – including Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper, Rachel Reeves and Tom Watson – who called on the Labour leadership to urgently revise its stance on immigration. Reeves claimed that there would be riots in the streets unless more restrictive measures were introduced.¹⁸ Starmer was characteristically more restrained. In an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show, he contradicted Labour’s official opposition to arbitrary immigration caps, arguing that migration was a ‘real concern’ and demanding that the government reduce it. When asked about Tory proposals to force companies to publish the number of foreign workers they employ, Starmer replied that the idea deserved to be ‘very carefully considered’.¹⁹

The chicken coup

The public rift between Corbyn and the PLP over immigration was one of the catalysts for the June 2016 ‘chicken coup’. By this time a plot to depose Corbyn had been long in the making. ‘Everyone knew it was coming,’ recalled Ian Lavery, the left-wing MP for Wansbeck. ‘It was an incredibly stressful time for supporters of Jeremy like myself.’ The Labour chief whip Rosie Winterton had informed shadow chancellor John McDonnell that ‘the coup is coming. It is planned for post-local government elections if they’re disastrous, or if the referendum goes wrong that will be used as an excuse for the coup and resignations.’²⁰ Sure enough, within forty-eight hours of the referendum result, the shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn was ringing his colleagues to inform them that a leadership challenge was in motion.²¹

Benn and his allies told the media that Corbyn was singularly responsible for the referendum loss, having refused to take a tough line on immigration or mount an effective Remain campaign. They held this up as proof that he was an ‘existential threat’ to Labour who would lose them fifty seats at the next general election (which was likely to be soon, given Cameron’s dramatic resignation the day after the Brexit vote). In reality, the PLP knew that Corbyn’s involvement in the Remain campaign had been energetic – ten pro-EU rallies, speeches and events in twenty-one cities, op-eds for national newspapers, questions in parliament and countless media appearances – whereas most of his critics on the Labour Right were nowhere to be seen.²² But this did not stop Corbyn’s detractors from using Europe as a wedge issue to peel off the moderate, Milibandian members of the shadow cabinet, many of whom were incensed at the leader’s suggestion that the exit process should be initiated by immediately triggering Article 50. The coup plotters drew up a schedule laying out exactly when each shadow cabinet member would resign so as to inflict maximal damage on LOTO. Close to midnight on Saturday, 25 June, Corbyn learned of Benn’s machinations and texted him to ask if they could speak. Benn freely admitted to the plan and was sacked on the spot. That gave the signal to his supporters on the frontbench. By Monday evening, twenty-three of them had handed in their resignations. By Tuesday, Corbyn had lost a PLP no-confidence vote 172 to 40.²³ A clutch of senior shadow cabinet advisers organized regular meetings in parliament to prepare anti-Corbyn briefings to the press.

Shadow cabinet sources say that Starmer’s resignation, tendered on 27 June, was coordinated with Benn and Watson. But whereas other MPs took this as an opportunity to highlight their political differences with Corbyn, Starmer’s resignation letter instead talked up his loyalty – ‘I have never spoken out publicly against you and I do not intend to now’ – and stated that he was only resigning because others had done so. ‘In the last few days I have maintained my support for you, notwithstanding my reservations. However, the resignations across the Shadow Cabinet and the Shadow Frontbench yesterday and today materially change this.’²⁴ One senior Labour staffer described this as ‘classic Keir. He doesn’t like to stick his neck out. He prefers to hide behind other people.’

Nonetheless, as the PLP struggled to dethrone Corbyn over the coming weeks, Starmer became more vocal in his support for the anointed challenger: Owen Smith, the former Pfizer lobbyist and Pontypridd MP who had supported privatizing the NHS and invading Iraq.²⁵ On 19 July, just six days after Theresa May replaced Cameron as prime minister, Smith triggered a leadership election, securing eighty-eight PLP nominations to run against Corbyn. His backers petitioned Labour’s National Executive Committee to exclude Corbyn from the ballot, hoping that Smith could run unopposed, but their appeals fell on deaf ears. Instead, they disenfranchised thousands of new members through last-minute rule changes, and weakened Corbyn’s base by upping the ‘registered supporter’ fee from £3 to £25.²⁶

The week Smith was nominated, Starmer told the New Statesman that he was ‘100 per cent behind Owen’, adding that ‘standing on the sidelines looking for the purest ideology is a dereliction of the duty for any Labour member’.²⁷ By mid-August Starmer was one of the London-based leaders of Smith’s campaign and a star speaker at his rallies.²⁸ He approached young members who were influential within the party and pressured them to publicly endorse his preferred candidate. One of those activists was Laura Murray, the political adviser to Labour’s shadow communities and local government secretary, whom Starmer spent two hours regaling with tales of Smith’s virtues over a coffee in Kentish Town. (Having failed to persuade her, Starmer later turned up at a Holborn and St Pancras Labour Party meeting where Murray was running for the role of chair and rallied his allies to block her appointment – an action that one senior Labour staffer described as ‘unprecedented for any sitting shadow cabinet member’.)

Despite Starmer’s campaigning and the Labour Right’s attempt at voter suppression, Smith crashed to defeat on 24 September. Over the course of the campaign he had undermined his claim to be the competent and sensible candidate with an astonishing string of gaffes (telling a journalist, unprompted, that he had never needed to use Viagra, and joking to a bewildered audience in Hull that he had a twenty-nine-inch penis).²⁹ When it came to policies, Smith’s main proposals – reinstating a Ministry of Labour, outlawing zero-hours contracts, raising top rates of tax, banning exclusive workforce recruitment from abroad – were copied and pasted from Corbyn’s programme.³⁰ The challenger’s stand-out quality was his strident Europhilia. Whereas Corbyn pledged to respect the referendum result, Smith advocated a second referendum in the event that May’s Brexit deal failed to preserve the benefits of EU membership. Notwithstanding their Remainer sympathies, the Labour membership saw the vacuity of this offer and voted accordingly. Corbyn increased his mandate, winning 62 per cent to his opponent’s 38 per cent.³¹

The Brexit brief

Shortly after the vote, Corbyn met with what became known as his ‘kitchen cabinet’ or ‘strategy group’: a select number of socialist MPs – John McDonnell, the shadow health secretary Diane Abbott and the shadow business secretary Jon Trickett – plus LOTO’s executive director of strategy and communications Seumas Milne and political adviser Andrew Murray. Their aim was to recompose a viable shadow cabinet in the aftermath of the coup, which had forced them to reduce the number of MPs on the Labour frontbench and ask some of the remaining shadow ministers to double up their portfolios. In the coming reshuffle, LOTO aimed to minimize the number of openly hostile MPs and promote those who had stayed loyal. Yet Corbyn also made it clear he wanted ‘big-name politicians who aren’t necessarily Corbynites’. The person that best fit this description was Keir Starmer. Aware that they were convening to decide his fate, Starmer indicated his willingness to join the shadow cabinet to a LOTO ally. McDonnell made a forceful argument for handing him a senior position, convincing the rest of the group that his inclusion would legitimize the leadership and bring other reluctant MPs on board.

While the strategy group met, Starmer was in Taipei on a Foreign Office–funded trip to advocate a moratorium on the death penalty in Taiwan.³² Corbyn’s chief of staff, the veteran trade unionist Karie Murphy, rang Starmer across the seven-hour time difference to offer him a job. At first Starmer insisted on speaking directly to Corbyn, but Murphy rebuffed him. ‘Tell me whether you’re in or out,’ she said, ‘and then you can speak to Jeremy.’ Starmer said that he was in, so long as he received the position of either shadow home secretary or shadow secretary of state for exiting the European Union. ‘It’s either that or nothing.’ Murphy knew that Abbott had been promised the former role, so she gave Starmer the Brexit brief and arranged a time later that day for him to ring Corbyn. When that phone call took place, Starmer told the leader that he and Murphy had agreed not only on his new position, but on an expanded shadow Brexit portfolio that would encompass aspects of international trade and foreign policy. Blindsided, Corbyn welcomed his colleague back to the frontbench and hung up. He then asked Murphy whether she had unilaterally given Starmer this raft of new responsibilities. ‘Of course not,’ she replied. Through that single act of misdirection, the QC had significantly increased his influence within the party.

The week Starmer ascended to the role of shadow Brexit secretary, he attended a private parliamentary event where one of his admirers in the PLP hailed him as ‘the man who’ll make sure we stay in the EU’. The Financial Times predicted he would ‘become a standard-bearer for various Europhile politicians on both sides of the Commons’.³³ Naturally these rumours sowed distrust among MPs from Leave constituencies, who feared that the member for Holborn and St Pancras would seek to reverse the referendum result, alienating working-class voters in the north of England. However, the notion that Starmer entered the job with the single-minded intention of stopping Brexit is erroneous. In late 2016 there was no momentum behind the movement for a second referendum. Those agitating for it in the party were outriders, and – according to some of his colleagues – Starmer cared more about carving out space for a future leadership bid than retaining EU membership. As one source close to Starmer put it, ‘Of course he’s a Remainer, like everyone else in his north London milieu. But it wasn’t meaningful to him in the way it was to Owen Smith. His personal ambition was always more important.’

Labour strategy

James Schneider, who co-founded Momentum before becoming Corbyn’s director of strategic communications, summed up the competing Labour positions on Brexit in 2016–17. ‘There were two perfectly coherent responses to the vote to leave the EU’, he said.

One is: we respect democracy, the EU’s not that great anyway, let’s find a progressive way to leave and accept that this will lose us some middle-class liberal voters. That position has wider strategic implications, because it requires the party to forge an alliance between Leavers and Remainers, which basically leads you into some form of left populism. On the other side, the equally coherent position is: Brexit is a really bad thing, so what we have to do is limit the damage, or – as a remote possibility, if public opinion shifts far enough – think about trying to prevent it. The vast majority of the party, at every level, was in the latter category.

That included Starmer, who was willing to work with LOTO on formulating a Brexit policy so long as it did not stray too far from damage limitation. Corbyn’s allies were divided on the issue. On one side, Milne, Murray, Murphy and Schneider favoured the left-populist approach; as did the so-called ‘Blood Brothers’, Lavery and Trickett, who were determined to prevent the party from courting metropolitan Remainers at the expense of Labour Leavers. On the other end of the spectrum, Diane Abbott, the policy director, Andrew Fisher, and the Brexit policy lead, Mark Simpson, along with most of the new shadow cabinet, sided with Starmer. Although Corbyn and McDonnell were naturally partial to the first group, they were scarred by the 2016 coup, and disinclined to cause another rebellion by pushing hard for a progressive Leave programme. McDonnell, in particular, was spooked by the reaction to a speech he gave on 15 November 2016, where he said that ‘we must embrace the enormous opportunities to reshape our country that Brexit has opened for us’.³⁴ Pro-EU MPs, led by Starmer, bombarded the shadow chancellor with furious responses, prompting him to moderate his line. Milne, for his part, felt that the core strategy group was the only thing keeping the Corbyn operation afloat, and was willing to forego divisive left-populist rhetoric around Brexit if it meant keeping Abbott and key aides on board.

As a result, there was an uneasy truce between Labour’s two Brexit factions during the winter and spring of 2017. In the absence of a left-wing Leave platform – based on expanded state aid, radical trade reforms and pro-migrant immigration policy – the leadership simply defaulted to mimicking the government’s Brexit plan in an attempt to neutralize the issue. If they ensured there was minimal space between the Labour and Tory approaches, then Corbyn’s strategists believed they could avoid falling into the fatal trap: a Brexit-dominated election that would split Labour’s base. Cleaving more or less to May’s position would allow them to move the debate onto more favourable terrain: austerity, education, nationalization and the health service. A simple procedure was devised to foreground these issues over the European question. As one LOTO strategist explained, ‘We did everything the Tories did. If they say they support triggering Article 50, so do we. If they say they’re ending free movement, we say we’re ending free movement. If they say they’re going to get a good deal, we say we’re going to get a “jobs-first” deal.’ Starmer was useful to the leadership in convincing his Remainer colleagues to sign up to this plan. He spent the first month of 2017 ‘dragooning Labour MPs to vote for Article 50’, according to another staffer, who noted that a significant number would be likely to have defied the whip if not for Sir Keir’s intervention.

Starmer’s tests

Yet, even if LOTO was following the Tories’ lead on Brexit, Corbyn judged he could not support any deal that May brought back from Brussels. To do so would reignite the civil war within the party and drastically increase the PM’s political capital. In this sense, Corbyn felt obliged to perform a careful balancing act, imitating May while also distancing himself from whatever type of Brexit she adopted. This is where Starmer’s famous series of ‘tests’ came in, echoing Gordon Brown’s strategy for avoiding accession to the eurozone in the early 2000s. First there were Starmer’s five tests for Labour to support the government’s Brexit negotiating strategy, which he set out in December 2016 (‘Does it give enough details for MPs to scrutinise the government’s approach?’, ‘Does it provide enough information for the OBR?’, and so on).³⁵ Then there were his six tests for the Brexit deal itself, published the following March, which demanded that it deliver ‘the exact same benefits’ as remaining within the single market and customs union.

Some in LOTO came to believe that Starmer’s tests ‘had been devised with a view to forcing Labour into a Remain position’, since there was no way that any government could pass them.³⁶ ‘They were never meant to be achieved,’ said Lavery. ‘They were meant to make sure we didn’t have a deal.’ But, as one of Corbyn’s aides qualified, a deal that delivered the ‘exact same benefits’ was not just a deliberately impossible test designed by Starmer; it was a pledge that the Brexit secretary David Davis had made in parliament on 24 January. ‘What we have come up with’, Davis said, ‘is the idea of a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have, but also enable my right honourable friend the secretary of state for international trade to go and form trade deals with the rest of the world.’³⁷ (The same was true of the phrase ‘constructive ambiguity’, which for many came to define Labour’s attitude to Brexit, but which was also borrowed from Davis: ‘You will find it difficult sometimes to read what we intend. That’s deliberate. I’m afraid in negotiations you do have constructive ambiguity from time to time.’³⁸)

Lavery is partly correct that Starmer’s tests were set up to fail: the combination of high standards and vague wording would allow Labour to claim that the Tories had flunked them, no matter what they offered. But that was not because Starmer secretly intended to hoodwink the party into a second referendum back in 2016. It was because he, and LOTO, needed an excuse to vote against May’s Brexit proposals despite having consciously aligned themselves with the government’s approach. LOTO was also trying to convince the media and business community, whom McDonnell regularly consulted via officials from the Confederation of British Industry, that Labour were a safer pair of hands on Brexit than the Conservatives – willing to compromise on issues such as customs policy and citizens’ rights. ‘We wanted to settle the nerves of the establishment over Brexit,’ said a source from the leader’s office, ‘and Keir was the perfect poster boy for that.’ Having six criteria for a ‘jobs-first’ deal thus brought several advantages at once. It allowed the party to counter accusations that it had no coherent Brexit policy, appeal to those worried about the economic impact of a ‘hard’ Tory Brexit, withhold support for May’s approach, and assert its respect for the referendum result by outwardly backing any deal that met its standards.

Even so, some in the left-populist camp saw where such pandering to the establishment would lead them. One northern MP told the Sunday Times correspondent Gabriel Pogrund that the tests were ‘crap’. ‘They were unsellable in my constituency. We want the same rights in the labour market as we’ve got already? What the fuck does that mean? People voted against Europe because they think work is shit. LOTO didn’t have the capacity to understand what was happening in held-back areas.’³⁹ Jon Trickett was equally scathing, telling Corbyn privately that Starmer’s conditions would pin Labour’s Brexit plan to the status quo, hobbling its ability to present a transformative post-EU settlement. He asked his staffers to draft a research document on UK labour laws, identifying which workers’ rights provisions were imposed by the EU and which were the result of domestic labour struggles. The findings tilted sharply in favour of the latter. There were a number of areas – such as holiday entitlement – where Britain had more favourable arrangements for workers than the EU. Trickett raised this at a strategy group meeting, pushing the leadership to change tack. He argued that by trying to limit the impact of leaving and align closely with Europe, Labour would eventually be pushed into the electorally unviable position of a ‘Remain party’. The only antidote, he averred, was a ‘radical post-Brexit recovery plan and new international settlement’. As well as making a positive case for economic revival outside the European single market, Labour should rebut the notion that Brexit was an intrinsically racist or nationalist endeavour by forging partnerships with other progressive leaders, particularly in the Global South. ‘Jeremy,’ he implored, ‘pick up the phone and speak to people like Lula in Brazil or Correa in Ecuador. Use Brexit to create new internationalist alliances. If you make the case for an anti-racist Labour Leave option, the membership won’t cling to Remain; they’ll come with you.’

Trickett reiterated this plan at a second meeting with strategy group members and the newly elected Socialist Campaign Group MPs, including the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and the shadow justice secretary, Richard Burgon. But on both occasions his suggestion met with scepticism from Milne and McDonnell. For them, as for Corbyn, there was little sense in drawing up a Brexit policy that would heighten tensions in the PLP and never come to fruition anyway. At this point the leadership assumed that May would strike a deal with Brussels that could pass in parliament without Labour’s support. Hence, the opposition’s primary role was merely to present a ‘credible, technical-sounding Brexit plan using our credible, technical-sounding shadow Brexit secretary’ (as one staffer put it), and treat this as a sticking plaster until the Tories voted through their Withdrawal Bill. Once May’s deal had been adopted, the political battleground would shift from the EU onto economic policy, where Corbyn could hammer the Tories on their record of austerity. Whereas Trickett wanted to put forward a real solution to the Brexit crisis in early 2017, the rational if short-sighted consensus in LOTO was that a rhetorical one would suffice.

At the polls

With the ‘damage limitation’ position locked in place, Starmer was given licence to signal – in increasingly unambiguous terms – that Labour would back the softest possible Brexit. After outlining his six tests, he began shoehorning the words ‘regulatory alignment’ into interviews, mooting the possibility that he would support membership of the single market and customs union, and asserting that Britain would stay in the EU indefinitely if a Labour government failed to secure a deal.⁴⁰ Throughout the early spring he made similar assurances to officials from the European Commission and politicians from the EU twenty-seven during regular trips to Brussels.

Then, on 18 April, Theresa May appeared outside Downing Street and called for general election, arguing that the Tories needed to increase their parliamentary majority in order to gain a strong negotiating position with the EU. (This was a transparent ruse; May was in a comfortable position to conduct the negotiations, but an election would allow her to take advantage of Labour’s poor poll ratings, which after months of internal warfare stood at 25 per cent.) The following afternoon, Labour backed the election motion in the Commons. With the party coming under intense pressure to further define its Brexit position, Starmer prepared to deliver his most significant policy speech to date. Addressing a large audience at the Institute of Civil Engineers, he compounded the impression that Labour, though opposed to a second referendum, would guarantee an orderly departure from the bloc and keep most of the current arrangements intact. He proposed an ‘EU rights and protections bill’ that would commit Labour to retaining all current ‘EU-derived laws’ and signing on to future ones. He pledged that Labour would protect the rights of European citizens even if the EU refused to give reciprocal guarantees. He vowed that the economy would come first in determining the porousness of the UK borders (despite his earlier rhetoric on immigration). And he insisted that, while exploring the possibility of staying in a customs union, Britain would ‘maintain membership of or equivalent relations with European organizations which offer benefits to the UK, such as Euratom, the European Medicines Agency, Europol and Eurojust’.⁴¹

Starmer was rewarded by the Remainer press for these steps towards ‘Brexit in Name Only’, with the Statesman gushing that he was ‘Labour’s best general election bet’: ‘the heart of a Remainer – but head of a pragmatic politician in Brexit Britain’.⁴² Although Abbott generally agreed with Starmer’s direction of travel – viewing Brexit as a xenophobic project that must be softened or resisted – she had no illusions about his motives. ‘He doesn’t want Brexit done,’ she reportedly told Corbyn at a strategy group meeting. ‘He wants you done, so he can become leader.’ After his speech to the civil engineers, Starmer was in a prime position to take the top job if, as was widely expected, Corbyn suffered a crushing defeat in the upcoming national ballot. He began to work alongside other centrist MPs in the recently re-established Brownite Tribune Group – which had functioned as a pro-Kinnock political caucus in the 1980s – to lay the foundations for a leadership challenge after the 2017 election.

But the election defied everyone’s expectations. As Schneider recalled, ‘Sky started the campaign calling it a “Brexit Election”. Whenever it had a constituency, it didn’t show them in red or blue. It showed them in blue or yellow, for these apparently crucial social categories of Leaver and Remainer, but we managed to change what the election was about.’⁴³ Corbyn’s first campaign speech anticipated the Tories’ attempt to weaponize the Leave–Remain split. ‘Theresa May will insist that this is an election about Brexit,’ he said. ‘She will try to downplay the issues that affect people’s lives every day and instead turn the election into an ego trip about her own failing leadership and the machinations of the coming negotiations in Brussels.’ Against this impulse, the Labour leader drew a more powerful dividing line: ‘It is the Conservatives, the party of privilege and the richest, versus the Labour Party, the party that is standing up for working people to improve the lives of all. It is the establishment versus the people.’⁴⁴

Looking back on the campaign, McDonnell picked out the key reason for its success. ‘We were the anti-austerity party,’ he said. ‘We were effective in having a simple anti-austerity message and then a policy programme where each policy reinforced that message.’⁴⁵ Labour’s 2017 manifesto, compiled by Andrew Fisher, produced a seismic shift in the national discourse on economic management, inflicting more damage on the ideology of Thatcherism than any political text that came before it. Its central components were higher taxes for top earners, corporations and the City; nationalization of rail, mail, water and energy; increased childcare provisions; abolition of tuition fees; investment in social housing and the repeal of benefit cuts. With its direct pitch and its combative title – ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ – the document supplanted the illusory Brexit polarization with a concrete class antagonism: masses against elites, workers against bosses. Its policies were communicated on the doorstep by thousands of Momentum canvassers and on social media through an effective digital strategy, generating reams of viral content over Facebook and Twitter. Corbyn was reported to have attracted more people to his rallies than any British politician since Churchill, whereas Theresa May struggled to adapt to the new terms of the debate – faltering in interviews and failing to articulate what, besides Brexit, she was offering.

The result? The biggest swing to Labour since 1945, with the highest turnout in twenty years. Almost 13 million votes for Corbyn: more than Blair received in 2001 or 2005. The Conservatives stripped of their majority and forced into a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Calvinists of the Democratic Unionist Party. In the heavily pro-Brexit north-east, Labour increased its popular-vote share by 8.6 points from 2015; in the north-west by 10.2 points. Leave seats including Crewe and Nantwich, Stockton South and Bury North were taken from the Tories.⁴⁶ Corbyn might even have done well enough to dislodge the Conservatives if not for the efforts of right-wing apparatchiks in Labour HQ.⁴⁷ Had he picked up seven knife-edge Tory constituencies (amounting to just 2,227 additional votes), he could have had the chance to form a government.⁴⁸ The atmosphere among Corbyn’s team on 8 June was euphoric. Yet the effect of Starmer’s Europhilic policies, combined with the collapse of the UKIP vote, still registered on the election map. The Tories had gained substantial new support in Leave seats such as Sedgefield, Bassetlaw, Bolsover, West Bromwich East.⁴⁹ With parliament now finely balanced, the struggle over Labour’s Brexit position was set to intensify – and the truce between Starmer and his opponents was about to crumble.

A new approach

Four weeks after the election, an all-party parliamentary group on UK–EU relations was established, co-chaired by Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry – both of whom would later become major figures in the People’s Vote campaign. With these forces mobilizing, it was LOTO’s responsibility to consolidate its gains and resist a movement towards Remain that would alienate more Leavers when the country returned to the polls. The received wisdom on the Labour Left is that at this point, Corbyn and his team became complacent, failing to devise a compelling line on Brexit that could have edged out the People’s Voters. As Owen Jones writes,

It was the ideal moment for Corbyn to make categorically clear that Labour would never support a new referendum, and would seek to implement the 2016 decision … In order to sell such a message, though, Labour would have first needed to define its Brexit position clearly – and it didn’t. The unfocused detachment that the Labour leadership had shown in the referendum aftermath simply continued … The top team – not least Seumas Milne – persisted in its belief that Labour’s Brexit position should be kept intentionally vague, and the party should avoid talking about it at all in favour of domestic policies.⁵⁰

‘The problem with this counterfactual’, as a senior Labour strategist told me, ‘is that Jeremy did unequivocally rule out a new referendum on several occasions – as did Diane, as did Keir, as did Emily.’ The issue was not that Corbyn’s top team stuck rigidly to its pre-election policy. On the contrary, they made a serious effort to swerve away from damage limitation towards left populism (or a ‘Reform Brexit’, as LOTO staffers began to call it). After the 2017 election, the new parliamentary arithmetic made it plausible that whatever deal May negotiated would be voted down in the Commons. It was therefore no longer an option to mimic the government’s approach to the EU. Labour had to devise its own, harnessing the election energy to prioritize class divisions over culture wars. Rather than dodging the Brexit issue, it would have to spell out a policy that fitted with the rest of its programme: an empowering, redistributive, internationalist withdrawal from European institutions. Once it had done so, May would either have to accept Brexit on these terms – an unlikely prospect – or call another general election in which the public would decide between her failed plan and Labour’s prospective one. Given the degree of enthusiasm for Corbyn’s leadership among rank-and-file Labour activists, LOTO knew it could secure the membership’s support for this progressive Leave policy, even if the majority of them had voted Remain in 2016. Corbyn and Milne did not suffer from ‘unfocused detachment’; they saw that this was the most plausible path to power. Yet that path was blocked by an internal wrecking operation – in which the key player was Keir Starmer.

Swapping one antagonism for another in this way was always going to be difficult. As Schneider said, ‘much of the media, who didn’t really understand Brexit before the referendum and were slightly taken aback by the vote to leave … wanted to view everything as either more Leave-y or more Remain-y’.⁵¹ Every policy the leadership proposed would be coded as either a ‘Remain policy’ or a ‘Leave policy’: a tendency that LOTO had indulged in early 2017 by allowing Starmer to set out his ultra-soft exit plan. McDonnell’s tentative suggestion that Labour should oppose a ‘workers’ Brexit’ to a ‘bankers’ Brexit’ had gone nowhere. Likewise, Andrew Murray’s June 2017 proposal to strike a cross-party Brexit agreement with Theresa May was shot down, both by Abbott (who dismissed it as ‘the Ramsay McCorbyn plan’) and by the government, who believed that the DUP would make easier negotiating partners. It thus became imperative to spell out what a distinctive Labour Leave deal would look like, and why it would transcend the culturalized split of 2016.

The outline of that deal was debated by the Brexit subcommittee, composed of Corbyn’s strategy group plus Starmer, Thornberry, Lavery, Smith, shadow cabinet members Barry Gardiner and Shami Chakrabarti, the chief whip, Nick Brown, senior aides, and occasionally Tom Watson. Their weekly meetings were fractious from the outset. Starmer argued for a commitment to single market and customs union membership, while Lavery and Trickett pushed in the opposite direction, wanting Labour to row back on the pro-EU stance it had adopted before polling day. Corbyn and McDonnell were unwilling to do anything that might reinforce the perception of Labour as the party of Brexit in Name Only. But, caught off guard by the election result, they had not yet had the opportunity to craft a convincing Leave programme; so shortly after parliament resumed on 21 June, they settled on a compromise: while Corbyn’s team set about reworking their Brexit policy, Starmer could brief that Labour would take all necessary steps to avoid a ‘cliff-edge’ exit in which the UK would crash out with no deal and default to World Trade Organization trading terms. That meant supporting ‘strong transitional arrangements’ with the EU ‘on similar terms to those we currently enjoy’.⁵² The party, Starmer announced, would accept staying in the single market and customs union on a temporary basis to stave off economic catastrophe.⁵³

After giving Starmer’s faction this concession, Milne began working with Fisher on a policy document entitled ‘Brexit: A New Approach’. LOTO’s chief strategist stressed the need to oppose the single market and customs union on both tactical and political grounds. Tactically, it would frustrate the Tories’ attempt to identify Labour with Remain and hegemonize marginal Leave constituencies. Politically, it would allow Labour to implement radical reforms outside the ordoliberal strictures of the EU, whose rules on competition, procurement and state aid clashed with multiple policies in the 2017 manifesto: publicly owned monopolies, a national investment bank and an integrated state-led industrial strategy.⁵⁴ The EU customs union also prevented Labour from developing an internationalist trading policy by guaranteeing competitive advantage for European producers.⁵⁵ With this in mind, John Hilary, the former director of the campaign group War on Want, was hired to develop a comprehensive ‘trade justice policy’ as an alternative to customs union membership (reminiscent of the strategy that Trickett had previously advocated). As Hilary mapped out an equitable approach to global trading partnerships, Schneider suggested a possible customs arrangement with the EU: procurement rules, measures to avoid a hard border in Ireland, and a ‘tariff band’ to guarantee a certain level of alignment while permitting the UK to strike deals with other countries.

To Coventry

The outcome of these efforts was supposed to be Corbyn’s flagship Brexit speech in February 2018. Delivered at the National Transport Design Centre in Coventry, it was intended to clarify that Labour would not be pursuing a ‘Remainers’ Brexit’; it would be pursuing a Labour Brexit rooted in the values of the Corbyn project: an intervention-ist state, workers’ rights, revitalized industry and solidaristic foreign policy. There was just one problem: Starmer was immovably opposed to all those things. After the election he had gone to meet Milne in LOTO and the two had wrangled over the question of EU state-aid rules. Starmer insisted they were necessary to stop states from undercutting one another. ‘You’ve got to have a level playing field,’ he said, citing the negative example of US state governments which adjust their regulations to attract investment away from their neighbours. Milne replied that it was corporations, not workers, that benefited from the standardized protocols of the single market. This disagreement over the EU rulebook set Starmer on course for a confrontation with the leadership, which finally occurred at a Brexit subcommittee meeting on 10 January. In anticipation of the Coventry speech, Corbyn read out Milne and Fisher’s ‘New Approach’ document to the assembled MPs and advisers. After listening silently for a few minutes, Starmer hit the roof. ‘Enough,’ he interrupted. ‘This is completely outrageous.’ The revised policy, he said, had been ‘sprung on us with no discussion, no consultation, no prior notice’. He warned he would resign unless the paper was substantially reworked with greater input from his team.⁵⁶

Corbyn and McDonnell were thrown by this spectacular outburst, and ‘directed Andrew Fisher to return to the drawing board, and devise a plan that could win Starmer’s support’, according to witnesses.⁵⁷ Yet the shadow Brexit secretary’s rage was entirely affected. Starmer had in fact been shown the policy document by LOTO far in advance of the meeting. His calculation appears to have been that, given Milne’s views on the single market and customs union, he would struggle to bring the leadership round to a ‘softer’ position by force of argument alone. So he contrived this procedural violation – claiming that he had been frozen out of a significant policy change – as a pretext for threatening to resign. This forced LOTO to capitulate, for if Starmer walked out on the eve of the Coventry speech, the ensuing row was sure to overshadow the policy announcement itself. An aide who worked closely with Starmer between 2016 and 2019 reflected that this was ‘typical of Keir. He can’t argue from a political standpoint; it always has to be about process’.

On 18 February 2018, the LOTO adviser Mark Simpson mediated talks between Starmer and Corbyn over the customs union policy, in which it was agreed that Labour would commit to ‘a customs union’ with the EU. The indefinite article was important, because it allowed the party to negotiate its own customs deal – in line with aforementioned ‘Labour values’ – rather than accepting the current EU rules. Corbyn’s team were mindful of the possibility that, by using any variation on the phrase ‘customs union’, the policy would be interpreted as another step on the road to Remain. But they convinced Starmer to accept a second provision which they hoped would obviate that risk. Over the coming weeks, the shadow Brexit secretary agreed to talk up Labour’s derogations from the single market, articulating its opposition to EU competition rules and its intention to transform the British economy by rejecting them.

On the basis of this agreement, Fisher began revising Corbyn’s Coventry speech, and the LOTO communications team tried to condense its crucial points. Their aim was to avoid a situation in which the media came away with the impression that ‘Labour supports a customs union’ or ‘Labour is turning toward Remain’. As Schneider explained,

We didn’t want this to be a Remain speech. We wanted this to be a “Britain after Brexit” speech which could appeal to the whole country. We were trying to say, “This is what a jobs-first Brexit is: it’s a form of industrial renewal.” And so, within that context, of course we need easy trade with the EU, back- and-forth of goods, etcetera, and that’s why we need a customs union. It’s not because we’re Remain-y people; it’s because we want industrial renewal with a much more active state directing and cajoling investment, in a way that links in with all of our other policies.

For Labour’s ‘new approach’ to succeed, the customs union had to be seen as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. LOTO made this clear to Starmer, who was scheduled to appear on the Andrew Marr Show the day before the speech. Milne, ringing from the roadside during a trip to the Scottish Highlands, told the shadow Brexit secretary that he must not under any circumstances announce the customs union policy. British manufacturing and industrial renewal were the talking points, not alignment with the EU. The speech would be about the future, not the past. Starmer replied that of course he would not mention the customs union until Corbyn had done so.

Within the first minute of the Marr interview, Starmer not only announced the customs union policy, he made every effort to collapse the distinction between ‘a’ customs union and ‘the’ customs union. ‘There’s going to have to be a new treaty,’ Starmer said. ‘It will do the work of the customs union. So it’s “a” customs union … But will it do the work of the current customs union? Yes, that’s the intention.’ When asked about the single market, Starmer did not mention the derogations or exemptions he had agreed with Milne. Instead he remarked that ‘the benefits of the single market must be there in the final agreement, and that’s a really important commitment’.⁵⁸ As a result, the press were primed to interpret Corbyn’s speech as an out-and-out concession to the Remainer camp. To make matters worse, Fisher – who came increasingly to side with Starmer in the customs union controversy – reworked the Coventry text to tone down the ‘Britain after Brexit’ programme designed by Milne and Schneider. Rather than presenting a progressive Labour Leave vision, much of the final draft simply restated the six tests: ‘Labour would seek a final deal that gives full access to European markets and maintains the benefits of the single market and the customs union as the Brexit secretary, David Davis, promised in the House of Commons.’

Standing at the back of the hall as Corbyn concluded his speech, Starmer’s senior staffer Ben Nunn bumped fists with Mark Simpson.⁵⁹ The opportunity to reframe the Brexit debate on Labour’s terms had been lost. The newspaper headlines announced that Corbyn would now embrace the EU even as he sought to leave it: ‘Corbyn shifts Labour towards soft Brexit’; ‘Corbyn backs customs union’; ‘Jeremy Corbyn: Labour would stay in customs union after Brexit’; ‘Labour WILL keep customs union for “full tariff-free access” to Europe’. May and her allies were given all the ammunition they needed to accuse Labour of betraying the referendum result. ‘This Conservative Government understands that the Brexit vote was a call for greater control over the policies which determine people’s lives’, said Davis. ‘Labour seem intent on giving that up.’⁶⁰

The lobbyist

The Coventry speech created a political opening for the People’s Vote campaign, which officially launched at a star-studded event in Camden on 15 April 2018. It was less than a year before the UK’s planned exit date, May’s attempts to secure a deal were failing, and the opposition had made its discomfort with the Leave project apparent. Internally, Fisher and Simpson worked to bring Labour into line with the customs union and single market, giving a presentation to the strategy group which claimed – with scant supporting evidence – that EU competition rules would not affect the party’s economic programme. At this crossroads, the section of the establishment that most loathed Brexit (the professional-managerial class, the media-entertainment complex and the liberal intelligentsia) saw their chance to apply the emergency brake. Their aim was to secure another referendum with Remain on the ballot. Their instrument, the Labour Party. Operating out of Millbank Tower in central London, the PV campaign was run by the former Times journalist Tom Baldwin, the public relations guru Roland Rudd, New Labour grandees Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, and some of the former Labour staffers who had worked against the party during the 2017 election. Their main allies in the PLP were Umunna, Watson, Chris Leslie and Stella Creasy. As they began to flood the airwaves with sentimental tributes to Europe, a growing number of MPs joined their ranks – changing the dominant Labour-Right Brexit position from damage limitation to outright obstructionism.

The orthodox history of Corbynism has it that Starmer was wary of this faction, torn between his Remainer instincts and his loyalty to the leadership. ‘To the People’s Vote campaign,’ write Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire in Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn, ‘Starmer was a disappointment. He remained committed, first and foremost, to negotiating a Brexit deal – no matter how popular endorsing a second referendum would prove among many Labour members.’⁶¹ This is precisely what Starmer and his staff told LOTO throughout the summer of 2018, as the leadership prepared for a showdown with the Blairites at the annual party conference in Liverpool. Starmer’s office assured Corbyn’s political secretary, Amy Jackson, that as far as they were concerned a second referendum was ‘totally stupid’ and ‘not a realistic position’. Yet, at the same time, Starmer was holding secret meetings with Baldwin and working to increase the PV campaign’s access to LOTO: pressuring other shadow cabinet members to facilitate discussions between PV staffers and Karie Murphy. Starmer was also in contact with the PV operation via his political adviser Chris Ward, who had spent years working for the Parliamentary Research Service – a body founded and directed by the former Gordon Brown staffer Nicola Murphy, closely affiliated with the anti-Corbyn groups Labour Tomorrow and Saving Labour. Murphy, who is married to Chris Leslie, went on to become the executive director of pro–second referendum Independent Group (later Change UK). Labour officials recall Nicola Murphy and Ward meeting throughout 2018 to ‘discuss Brexit’: conversations which went unmentioned to the rest of the shadow cabinet.

For Karie Murphy, who largely rebuffed Starmer’s overtures to sit down with the PV campaign, the shadow Brexit secretary’s role seemed obvious in retrospect: ‘Mandelson and Campbell knew that he had leadership ambitions which they could exploit by turning him into the leader of the People’s Vote campaign,’ she said. ‘He became their man. Was he a disappointment to them? Of course he wasn’t.’ Despite Pogrund and Maguire’s narrative, Starmer had in fact signed up to the PV cause by mid-2018, in the process raising his profile and ingratiating himself with the people who would ultimately crown him leader: not just the right-wing Labour establishment, but the pro-European membership and the anti-Corbyn editors at the Observer, with whom he developed a close acquaintance.

Yet in summer 2018 the extent of this alliance was unknown to LOTO, which tasked Starmer’s office with lobbying the general secretaries of every major union ahead of the Liverpool summit. Amy Jackson set Starmer two assignments. First, to ensure that the unions were on board with the leadership’s position: a general election to stop a Tory Brexit, followed by a Labour deal with a customs union. Second, to get them to submit conference motions to this effect. These motions, along with submissions from CLPs, would be amalgamated at the compositing meeting of the conference. The composite motion would then be voted on by delegates to determine the official party line.

But rather than lobby the unions on behalf of the leadership, Starmer proceeded to lobby them on behalf of the PV campaign. When they reported back to LOTO, Starmer’s team announced that it was mission accomplished: the general secretaries had all signed up to the policy. But when asked to produce the conference motions, they fell silent. They had not got the unions to submit them. ‘They told us everything was fine,’ said Jackson, ‘but they deliberately refused to take the steps to ensure everything was fine.’ That was because some of the most important unions – including the TSSA and GMB – had been convinced of the PV position, and were now endorsing a confirmatory referendum on any Brexit deal. Starmer concealed this fact from LOTO lest it intervene to bring the general secretaries back into line.

Meanwhile, Baldwin, with Starmer’s knowledge, had got hundreds of CLPs to submit motions calling for a public vote with Remain on the ballot. The pro–second referendum unions joined with a consortium of Remainers who sought to extract concessions from the leadership: Laura Parker of Momentum, Michael Chessum of Another Europe Is Possible, Eloise Todd of Best for Britain, Manuel Cortes of the TSSA and Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate. A Labour source reported that Parker told Momentum delegates – who were loyal to Corbyn and mostly undecided on the second referendum question – that Corbyn wanted to pass the most Europhilic motion possible, but needed the cover of conference to do so. A raft of them therefore supported PV motions on the mistaken assumption that they were aiding the leadership.

Thanks to these manoeuvres, LOTO risked going into the compositing process with no motions that facilitated its aim of fending off a second referendum: a scenario that was narrowly avoided when the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union agreed to submit one at the last minute. In the seven-hour compositing meeting on 23 September, Starmer tried repeatedly to push the assembled delegates towards a pro-EU position based on the text supplied by Cortes: ‘If no general election is called in which the people can have a say on their futures, Labour must support an extension to Article 50 and a public vote on the terms of the Brexit deal.’⁶² The most zealous PV supporters wanted a commitment to campaign for Remain, while more moderate factions argued that Remain should only appear as one of several options. As the meeting dragged on into the small hours, Starmer’s staffers briefed their allies in the PV campaign that they were on course to win. But Jackson, Trickett and the left-wing trade unionists managed to block them. Although Another Europe Is Possible had packed the room with Remainer delegates, who made up roughly 85 per cent of the assembled crowd, the final motion had to be passed by consensus – and allies of the leadership were determined to hold out. As it approached 1am, Jackson talked down the TSSA and GMB, and a more equivocal resolution without the word ‘Remain’ was adopted. ‘If we cannot get a general election,’ it read, ‘Labour must support all options remaining on the table, including campaigning for a public vote.’⁶³

With this wording, the leadership could reaffirm its commitment to a jobs-first Brexit deal. A new referendum, it maintained, was merely a democratic check on the ‘hard’ or ‘no deal’ Brexit favoured by May. It was not an attempt to reverse the democratic mandate of 2016, nor did it signal a pivot towards Remain. McDonnell explained this in an interview with the BBC the next morning, in which he stated, ‘If we are going to respect the last referendum,’ the public vote ‘will be about the deal. It will be a negotiation on the deal … Parliament will determine the nature of the question that will be put, but the first stage of that is to see if we can get a deal that is acceptable and brings the country together again. And I’ve always thought we could.’⁶⁴

But the shadow Brexit secretary had different ideas. For him, the conference motion could be used to deepen Labour’s association with the PV campaign. The door was now open for the latter to cannibalize the former, weaken Corbyn and appoint Starmer de facto leader. He triggered this coup de main with his conference speech on 25 September, declaring from the podium that ‘if we need to break the impasse our options must include campaigning for a public vote and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option’. The political impact of these words can hardly be overstated. In Pogrund and Maguire’s telling, Starmer had interpreted McDonnell’s remarks to the BBC as ‘a calculated slight at best – and at worst an attempt to cut the new policy off at the knees’ by ruling out a referendum with Remain on the ballot. They write that Starmer made a snap decision to depart from his script during the conference speech and reiterate that all options, including Remain, were ‘on the table’, after McDonnell had unilaterally destroyed the ‘compromise which had taken months to negotiate’.⁶⁵

But in reality, there was nothing unscripted or spontaneous about Starmer’s remarks. He would have delivered them regardless of McDonnell’s interview. LOTO was already suspicious about the speech in the run-up to the conference, as the text of it had seemingly been withheld from key staffers. When Corbyn’s aides finally got hold of a copy, they found a sentence that closely resembled the one Starmer ended up saying (‘and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option’). Jackson instructed Starmer to remove the clause and he complied, only to reinstate it later without her knowledge. In preparation for the speech, Starmer’s allies had filled the room with pro-EU delegates to ensure he received a standing ovation once the crucial sentence was uttered. The adoring crowd was captured by the press photographers, and the word that had been deliberately omitted from the composite motion – ‘Remain’ – became the headline for the entire Labour conference.

Within minutes, the Tories published a social media graphic citing Starmer’s comments as evidence of Labour’s betrayal: ‘CONFIRMED: Labour will not respect the result of the referendum’. Jackson sent an irate text to Fisher, whose reply brushed off the significance of the speech. At Murphy’s prompting, she ran backstage to confront Starmer and Nunn, brandishing the graphic on her phone. ‘Do you realise how much damage you’ve just done?’ she asked them. ‘You’ve made us look like a Remain party.’ Starmer countered that he was merely reiterating the conference position. ‘You know the position,’ she shot back. ‘You know it from the painful composite meeting we were in for seven hours, in which we took the word Remain out.’ A Corbyn aide later remarked that Starmer had ‘completely fucked us’.⁶⁶ Looking back on the event, Jackson remembers her immediate response: ‘My first thought was, he wants to be leader, and that is all that speech was about.’

‘Brexit can be stopped’

For Andrew Murray, the main takeaway from the 2018 Labour conference should have been Corbyn’s speech, not Starmer’s. The following day, the leader had said that he would support any deal Theresa May negotiated as long as it protected workers’ rights, maintained environmental standards and included a customs union. In the next meeting of the strategy group, Murray asked his colleagues to consider what that deal would look like in practice. But no answer was forthcoming beyond Starmer’s six tests; at which point it dawned on Murray that a disastrous and potentially irreversible shift had taken place. The six tests had been designed as a rhetorical tool which would allow Labour to oppose May’s deal in the knowledge that it would likely pass anyway. Eighteen months later, they had become a real means of obstructing Brexit in the Commons. (Tellingly, on the same day as his conference speech, Starmer told journalists that he was likely to vote down any deal the Tories brought back from Brussels.)⁶⁷ If a withdrawal agreement couldn’t pass in parliament, this put Labour on an inevitable trajectory to supporting a second referendum – in which the bulk of the party, led by Starmer, would campaign for Remain. This sequence would destroy the insurgent energy of Corbynism and tie Labour to the Mandelson–Campbell bloc, sealing its electoral oblivion.

The party drew nearer to this destination on 13 November, when May announced that she had finally secured a deal. The next morning Starmer and Nick Brown attended a briefing with the chief Brexit negotiator, Olly Robbins, who laid out the terms of the agreement – including the notorious ‘Irish backstop’ provision, which aimed to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic by keeping the UK in some aspects of the single market in the event that a free trade agreement with the EU proved impossible to negotiate. Starmer’s meeting was interrupted by the news that the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, who had only been appointed in July, had just resigned in protest.⁶⁸ The scale of discontent at the backstop soon became apparent, as the DUP joined forces with rebel Tories preparing to vote against it. May reluctantly decided to postpone bringing the bill to the Commons until the new year. Starmer piled on the pressure by using an ancient parliamentary procedure called the ‘humble address’ to force the government to publish its legal advice on the backstop, predicting that this would redouble Tory opposition to the deal by revealing that the UK could become permanently trapped inside the single market. (Starmer initially insisted that Labour must oppose the backstop, then U-turned after the Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney told him that there was probably no other way to preserve the Good Friday Agreement.)⁶⁹ On its own, Starmer’s push to get the government’s legal advice published was of no great consequence. But he was clear that this was merely the first of several parliamentary mechanisms he would use to delay, impede and eventually reverse the process of leaving the EU, telling Sky News that ‘Brexit can be stopped’.⁷⁰

The Tory whips spent the Christmas break pleading with Labour MPs in Leave seats to back May’s agreement, but their appeals were futile – partly because PV activists had been working on plans to deselect MPs who voted with the government. When May finally brought it to parliament on 15 January, it was rejected 432 to 202. With Britain’s exit date looming, Labour had no choice but to clarify its position: what kind of exit agreement would it accept? And in what circumstances would it support a second referendum? These questions were addressed by the Brexit subcommittee, which had stopped meeting in early 2018 and then reformed with fewer members after the September conference. By the time it restarted, Corbyn had been worn down by a succession of smear campaigns led by his opponents.⁷¹ He was emotionally exhausted, and increasingly uninterested in the Brexit issue after his failed bid to reframe it in class terms.

Starmer seized upon this apathy to dominate the Brexit subcommittee. He would typically let the back-and-forth between Leave and Remain factions play out – Lavery warning that further concessions to the Blairites would spell disaster, Thornberry claiming that the Lib Dems were on course to win seventy seats – and then conclude the meeting with a grand summary, which would gently steer the discussion towards the PV position. By presenting his argument in neutral terms, as the mere synthesis of other people’s views, he was able to avoid open antagonism and shift the dominant opinion in the room. One member of the subcommittee remarked that he ‘never engaged with the argument against another public vote’, preferring to ignore the polling data that showed its probable impact. When May’s deal was voted down, Starmer told the group that it was ‘time to move quickly through the gears of the conference motion’. Labour should demand nothing less than full access to the single market and customs union, he said. If the PM refused to deliver it, then a second referendum was the last remaining option. His proposed tagline for this policy was ‘Stop a damaging Tory Brexit’ – a slogan that didn’t sit well with Corbyn’s staffers, since it implied that they could never support any form of ‘Tory Brexit’, even if they managed to extract meaningful concessions from May. After one such intervention, Starmer was packing up his papers to leave when Murphy stopped him. ‘Just so you know, Keir,’ she said, ‘everything you just said has not been agreed. It is not the position.’ Starmer replied that, on the contrary, the subcommittee had just collectively arrived at this conclusion, which must now be communicated to the relevant shadow ministers. ‘Jeremy,’ said Murphy, ‘is that the position?’ Corbyn rose from his stupor and quietly answered in the negative.

But although the leadership managed to check the speed of Starmer’s flight towards Remain, it allowed him to continue down the path that led there. On 6 February, as May returned to Brussels to negotiate changes to the backstop, Corbyn set out his minimal criteria for endorsing any revised Brexit deal in a letter to the PM: a permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union; close alignment with the single market; dynamic alignment on rights and protections; clear commitments on participation in EU agencies; and unambiguous agreements on the detail of future security arrangements.⁷² These conditions, drafted by Starmer (who pushed hard for the inclusion of a second referendum in this list), were little more than the six tests rebooted. May could never conceivably agree to them. But even the LOTO staffers who had once favoured striking a deal with the Tories now believed that, by presenting a set of impossible demands, Labour could heighten the divisions in parliament and force a general election, coasting to power while the Conservatives imploded over the backstop. ‘The thinking was, if we become intransigent, the government will collapse,’ said Murray. After the defeat of May’s deal, he, Corbyn and Milne were willing to park their hesitations about Starmer’s obstructionist approach and permit it as a provisional tactic to bring down the government; after which they would ostracize the People’s Voters and negotiate a workable deal with the EU.

But as far as Starmer was concerned, a general election was no longer desirable. Any hope of using the PV machine as a springboard for a Labour leadership campaign would be in tatters if Labour came to power without pledging to hold a second referendum. He began to campaign, publicly and privately, for the party to reverse its order of priorities. Whereas the 2018 conference motion had insisted that Labour’s first preference was for an election, Starmer started telling journalists that this was no longer a ‘credible option’. He argued in the Brexit subcommittee that it was imperative to secure a public vote during the current parliament, and worked with the whip’s office to impress this on others in the PLP. That created further tension with the leadership, which responded to Starmer’s briefings with a terse statement reaffirming the conference position: ‘The options are a general election, which remains our preferred option, some form of agreement along the lines Jeremy laid out in his letter to Theresa May, and failing that a public vote remains an option on the table.’⁷³

At an especially cantankerous Brexit subcommittee meeting in February 2019, Lavery stormed out when Abbott insinuated that his Leave-voting constituents were racists. Corbyn tried and failed to keep the peace before leaving the room himself in exasperation. While they were gone, the pro-PV shadow cabinet members voted through a motion to strengthen the commitment to a second referendum. Shami Chakrabarti and Barry Gardiner, who had so far been uncomfortable with Starmer’s political direction, saw no alternative given the parliamentary deadlock, and reluctantly offered their support. Like Corbyn, their resolve had been weakened by months of constant media pressure – fuelled by Starmer himself – to swing behind a second referendum. On the evening of 25 February, LOTO was compelled to send a private briefing to MPs saying that it would back a public vote, in which a ‘credible leave option’ would face off against Remain in order to stop a Tory Brexit. Later that night, Thornberry did a round of media interviews where she pushed the line further still, asserting that both she and Corbyn would be campaigning for Remain.⁷⁴ An apoplectic LOTO aide briefed to journalists that she ‘misspoke’. The next day, Trickett told her through gritted teeth that she had just ‘sent an electric shock through the whole of the north’.

Whipping the leadership

It was at this time that Starmer and Nick Brown began running what multiple aides and shadow cabinet members described as a ‘parallel operation’ at the top of the party. The job of the whip’s office is normally to persuade MPs to vote for the leadership’s positions while keeping LOTO in touch with backbench feeling. But from early 2019 it began to play the opposite role: persuading the leadership to alter its policies to reflect the wishes of the PLP.⁷⁵ Starmer and Brown were both set on the idea of forcing through a second referendum before a general election. This project was always arithmetically impossible, given there were twenty Labour MPs who would refuse to back it under any circumstances. But Starmer’s determination to become the darling of the Remain lobby, combined with the PV campaign’s delusion that they could convince dozens of Leave MPs, emboldened them to try.⁷⁶ Because LOTO was almost entirely isolated from the PLP, it relied on the whip’s office as a mediator, tasked with reporting back to Corbyn on the sentiment in parliament. ‘The whip’s office could’ve said whatever they wanted and we wouldn’t have known better,’ recalled one adviser. That enabled them to continually overhype the threat of Remainer rebellions or defections, and exaggerate the possibility that a second referendum bill could pass. Such misinformation was faithfully repeated by Starmer in the Brexit subcommittee. As a result, LOTO was duped into adopting various self-destructive positions – most notably, on the ‘indicative votes’ and the Kyle–Wilson amendment.

The former was an attempt to break the stasis in the Commons after May’s bill was voted down a second time and the EU exit date deferred. On 27 March, MPs were presented with eight separate Brexit scenarios: no deal, ‘Managed No Deal’, revoking Brexit entirely, European Free Trade Association membership, a common market, Labour’s deal, a customs union, and a second referendum. Labour decided to whip for the final three, after Starmer vetoed an attempt by Jackson to dilute its support for the public-vote option. LOTO tried to ban abstentions on the first round of indicative votes, yet this move was blocked by the whip’s office – which feared it may cause Labour’s deal to win out over a second referendum. As a result, said Schneider, ‘everyone voted for their first preference and abstained on all the other votes’. All eight options failed to gain a majority. ‘Hypothetically,’ he continued, ‘if MPs had been forced to vote, something resembling Labour’s deal would likely have passed.’

But Brown and Starmer were determined to impress upon Corbyn – whether or not it was true – that no soft Brexit deal could make it through the Commons. With this avenue blocked, the only remaining options for Labour would be campaigning for a public vote or supporting May’s deal. Since the party had effectively ruled out the latter, that left a second referendum as the only alternative. In early April, LOTO proposed submitting its own withdrawal deal to parliament as a complete piece of legislation: a measure that some in Corbyn’s team believed was necessary to show that they were trying to respect the result amid mounting criticism that Labour was ignoring the 2016 mandate. Again, Starmer and the whips crushed the suggestion. In its place, they worked doggedly to promote the Kyle–Wilson plan (so-called after two right-wing Labour MPs), whereby the opposition would agree to abstain on May’s Withdrawal Bill in return for a ‘confirmatory referendum’ with Remain on the ballot. This was framed as a compromise solution from the backbenches, but as one shadow cabinet member remarked, it was in fact ‘orchestrated by Keir to push Labour into supporting Remain, as it made the only options May’s deal – which we couldn’t support – or staying in the EU’. A party official gave a similar characterization of the proposed amendment. ‘Keir was the architect of Kyle–Wilson,’ they said. ‘LOTO opposed it because we knew it would lead to a massive split in the party, with multiple people resigning from the frontbench, and it would never get through anyway. But that didn’t matter to Keir and the whips, because fundamentally these people didn’t want Jeremy to be prime minister.’

During several heated discussions on the Kyle–Wilson policy, which took place in both the Brexit subcommittee and the whip’s office, Trickett argued that it directly contravened the party line. He reminded the shadow Brexit secretary that Labour had agreed to support a public vote on a ‘credible deal’ versus Remain. Since May’s deal could not be considered credible – having been voted down on three occasions – Labour could only keep this commitment by putting its own Brexit proposal on the ballot. But Corbyn had come to see this as a semantic argument. He overestimated the chances of the amendment passing, based on Starmer and Brown’s assurances, and thought that it could bring a much needed end to the disastrous Brexit saga. The whip’s office had meanwhile been ‘briefing against Jeremy at all times during this period’, according to one shadow cabinet member, who described it as ‘the epicentre of the anti-Jeremy section of the PLP’, planting story after story to cement the turn towards a public vote. Buckling under these sustained efforts, Corbyn imposed a three-line whip in favour of the Kyle–Wilson proposal, writing a note to MPs which conceded that, although it was not official policy, they would be obliged to support it anyway. As many of Corbyn’s aides predicted, the measure was defeated when a motion calling for a confirmatory referendum was brought to the second round of indicative votes on 1 April. Lavery and Trickett had made a last-minute effort to water it down, but failed to gain the crucial support of Long-Bailey or Burgon. Having broken the whip to vote against it, the Blood Brothers visited LOTO to tender their resignations, which were politely rejected by Corbyn.

McDonnell flips

At this point, said Murphy, ‘Jeremy was deeply uncomfortable with the Remain position he’d been pushed into’. While Starmer was the prime mover of this policy, an equally consequential figure – without whom the leader would not have flipped – was McDonnell. The shadow chancellor was a stalwart of the British Left whom Corbyn had every reason to trust. In the 1980s, as chair of finance for the Greater London Council, he had overseen creative exercises in ‘people’s planning’, funding workers’ co-ops and cultural centres to the annoyance of the Thatcher government. Along with Corbyn, he opposed the War on Terror and the British occupation of Northern Ireland. He was active in the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and worked to build links between fighting unions and the Labour Left. As shadow chancellor he developed the most transformative economic programme in the party’s history, while fostering a new generation of left intellectuals associated with think tanks such as the New Economics Foundation and the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, as well as younger economists at the Institute for Public Policy Research. He is a peerless communicator and media performer: measured, cool-headed, with an aptitude for explaining radical policy in accessible terms.

Yet for all McDonnell’s strengths, nobody was more susceptible to the scare-mongering of the whip’s office. That was largely because, since December 2018, Westminster had been thrumming with talk of a new centrist party. Two of Blair’s former staffers, Jonathan Powell and Philip Collins, had been meeting with potential supporters of a pro-EU breakaway project, which seemed more likely by the day.⁷⁷ Having uncritically absorbed the whips’ warning of a major rift, McDonnell feared that between seventy and eighty MPs were about to jump ship to this new formation. In his view, an iron-clad commitment to a second referendum was the only way to prevent this wave of defections. He therefore ‘took it upon himself to become the special envoy to the Labour Right’, in the words of a LOTO source. He met regularly with Alastair Campbell – going so far as to invite him to the leader’s office without consulting Corbyn or his staff. He assured the People’s Vote campaign that he would bring Labour round to their position. Similar promises were made to another pro-EU network, established after the 2018 conference, which called itself the Bruges Group (riffing on the Brexiteer think tank of the same name). This consisted of Cortes, Parker, Chessum, Todd and the journalist Paul Mason. McDonnell told them he would get rid of the staffers in Corbyn’s inner circle who were impeding the turn towards Remain. By early 2019 he had begun a briefing campaign against Milne and Murphy in particular. McDonnell also brought in a raft of new centrist aides. The former head of the civil service, Bob Kerslake, was hired to depose Murphy, while the Whitehall staffer Helene Reardon-Bond was asked to step in as her replacement. McDonnell urged the removal of Jon Trickett from the strategy group and tried to break Corbyn’s resistance throughout 2019, cornering the leader in his office for hours at a time and ambushing him at his allotment at the weekend. When he couldn’t get agreement out of Corbyn, he would bypass him and issue unilateral instructions to LOTO staff, creating an atmosphere of division and disorientation. Starmer, for his part, held open sessions in his office to reassure MPs about the party’s Brexit policy after rumours of a split began to surface. This impressed McDonnell, who in turn vowed to support Sir Keir’s strategy of parliamentary obstruction.

The shadow chancellor’s willingness to divide the Left, demoralize the leadership and empower the ghosts of New Labour was baffling to many. Those who witnessed it first-hand offer a twofold explanation. First, McDonnell suffered from hubris. ‘John has smartest guy in the room syndrome’, was how one party official put it. He was convinced that his strategic nous was superior to Corbyn’s. But once the pair began to clash – with McDonnell advocating greater compromise with the Right on a number of key issues – he found his influence diminished. By pandering to the PV campaign, he clawed back some of the authority he believed was rightfully his. Far from holding his nose in meetings with Campbell, by all accounts McDonnell enjoyed the illusion that he was becoming the most powerful man in the party by cosying up to its Blairite flank. ‘He loves playing the role of leader,’ said a source who has worked closely with him. ‘Being Remainer-in-chief allowed him to do just that.’

Second, and more importantly, McDonnell is famously unreliable at times of crisis. Despite his composure in front of news cameras, he has a reputation for making knee-jerk decisions without thinking through their consequences. A prominent figure in the British labour movement remarked, ‘Whenever he’s presented with a difficult decision, he panics, chooses the first option that occurs to him, and then sticks with it no matter what. He is the worst strategist I have ever seen.’ Another source who has known McDonnell for much of his political career said, ‘He has a tendency to panic. Anyone who has worked with John, and who knows what strategy is, knows that he is not a strategist.’ So when McDonnell was courted by the PV campaigners and informed that mass defections were imminent, his vanity and his anxiety were activated at the same stroke. He chose the easiest course of action – to give the Blairites what they wanted – and stuck with it regardless of the implications. Slowly and painfully, he managed to bring Corbyn with him on this journey towards the centre.

Yet, in the end, the great split anticipated by McDonnell was illusory. Only eleven MPs, eight of them from Labour, joined the Umunna–Soubry contraption. The policies of the new centrist party – a second referendum plus more austerity and privatization – were strikingly unpopular. Their media appearances were disastrous. Their internal culture was dysfunctional. In April 2019, after two months of glowing coverage from all the major outlets, a Survation poll put their support at 1 per cent.⁷⁸ By June that had dropped to 0 per cent, where it stayed until the next election. There is no reason to believe that Change UK would have fared any better had Labour retained a more principled Brexit policy. ‘After all,’ explained a LOTO strategist, ‘this isn’t the 1980s. There is no constituency for the Labour Right any more. It was always blindingly obvious that this was a Westminster confection.’ Yet, unable to recognize this fact, McDonnell continued to agitate for a second referendum even after the defeat of Kyle–Wilson. Rather than unite with Corbyn against the Right of the PLP, he joined with Starmer in dedicating most of his energy to undermining an already embattled LOTO.

A Conservative overture

In spring 2019 a surprise development threatened to derail the shadow chancellor’s plan. On 2 April, the prospect that had long been mooted by Murray – of a ‘Ramsay McCorbyn’ cross-party Brexit deal – suddenly began to look like a reality. Isolated by many of her own backbenchers, the PM formally invited the opposition to enter talks aimed at winning their support for a revised Withdrawal Bill. These negotiations, which began with a preliminary meeting the next day, were perhaps the final opportunity for Labour to avert the electoral traps set by Starmer and McDonnell. Corbyn went in feeling sceptical: he saw them primarily as a PR stunt that could revive Labour’s reputation amid the ongoing media attacks, rather than a process that could achieve concrete results. But after the first gathering – in which Corbyn, Milne, Starmer, Brown and Long-Bailey met May’s team in the Commons office – the mood in LOTO changed. Fisher reportedly told colleagues with a note of consternation that ‘they’re going to offer us whatever we want’. One of those who led the talks reflected, ‘The government was far more serious than people thought. They wanted a deal.’

When discussions began in earnest on 4 April, Corbyn and May were not in attendance, and the process was over-seen by the Downing Street chief of staff, Gavin Barwell. He and Murphy concurred that an agreement was within reach, with the Tories willing to back down on all the major points of contention. They were ready to accept a customs union under a different name (for example, ‘customs arrangement’) as well as protections for labour and environmental standards. On questions of security and participation in EU agencies, there was little space between the two sides. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, told journalists that the government no longer had any ‘red lines’.⁷⁹ After the first grand meeting between the delegations, discussions were devolved to a series of breakout groups facilitated by senior civil servants. Long-Bailey met with her opposite number, Starmer with his, and so on across the relevant frontbench positions. Communicating through a backchannel, Barwell and Schneider discussed how to close the gap on technical issues relating to trade and customs.

The main problem for LOTO was not getting the Tories to move on any of the key political questions; it was avoiding the impression of a ‘rose garden moment’ in which Corbyn’s support for a Brexit deal would revivify May’s government just as it was about to collapse. Staffers in the leader’s office devised a plan to avoid this scenario. For Milne and Schneider, there was no need to come out of the negotiations with a complete withdrawal agreement that both parties could endorse. Instead, they could split the Brexit agreement into distinct parts. The proposals for a customs union and regulatory alignment could be presented as a series of amendments to the already existing Withdrawal Bill, with Labour whipping to vote for the first and abstain on the second. Or, alternatively, the withdrawal legislation could itself be divided into separate sections, allowing Labour to vote for some and against others. That way, the Conservatives could not claim that Labour had capitulated by revoking its opposition to the bill.

Murphy, meanwhile, cared less about the parliamentary manoeuvres and more about ensuring that Corbyn’s backing for a Tory deal would not be perceived as a betrayal of the labour movement. She organized a private meeting between Barwell and Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, who agreed that there were grounds to back the government’s deal given the right concessions on workers’ rights. ‘We are negotiators,’ he told Barwell, ‘professional negotiators, and I can tell you that if you sent us away over a weekend with what I know is on the table, we’ll be able to cut a deal.’⁸⁰ On that basis, Murphy argued that the major trade unions should be formally included in the negotiating process. If the final deal got their approval, the terms of Brexit would not be seen as a top-down decision made by Corbyn and May; they would represent a temporary alliance between organized labour and the executive against the rest of the political establishment.

McDonnell refused to countenance Murphy’s suggestion. Fearing that she would clinch a deal once the breakout groups had concluded their sessions, he set up a new WhatsApp group with the Labour negotiators to take control of the talks. Aware that Murphy went to visit her ill mother in Glasgow every Friday, McDonnell rescheduled the next meeting between the delegations for a Friday afternoon. Murphy asked Corbyn to intervene on her behalf, but he refused, telling her, ‘I wish you’d stop being so suspicious of everything John does.’ When the two teams met, McDonnell and Starmer did all they could to reverse the progress that had been made over previous days. Those in attendance were struck by Starmer’s change of demeanour during the talks. The careful, conflict-averse lawyer whom they had observed at shadow cabinet meetings was now continually interrupting his colleagues, scoffing at their suggestions and undermining their attempts to build common ground. Each time Barwell pointed to an area of accord between the two sides, Starmer reflexively replied that differences remained. ‘He was always being ultra-confrontational,’ said one witness. ‘He was always keen to shut them down.’ Starmer encouraged his team not to respond to Barwell’s concessions with any urgency, telling them that ‘we should not be bumped or rushed by the government’.⁸¹ Barwell quickly realized what was going on. At one point he arrived with the text of a draft agreement and began reading it out to the negotiators. When he had finished, Starmer said that the Tories were wasting their time if they expected Labour to sign up to the proposal. Barwell then revealed to Starmer that what he had just read out was Labour’s own Brexit policy – authored by Starmer himself.

At this stage, McCluskey had come to the conclusion that the shadow Brexit secretary ‘frankly just didn’t want a deal’,⁸² but Murphy remained determined to get one. She went behind McDonnell’s back to organize a ‘secret summit’ in the LOTO boardroom, attended by Barwell, Olly Robbins and May’s communications director, Robbie Gibb.⁸³ In Starmer’s absence, they once again agreed on the contours of a deal. Yet Starmer had meanwhile been briefing journalists that the talks were ‘on the verge of collapse’ and imploring his colleagues to cancel further meetings. He intimated that he would resign if a deal was struck – a prospect that Corbyn was desperate to avoid. McDonnell and Abbott pressured Corbyn to disengage immediately, warning him that they could not be seen to act as the Tories’ saviours. The shadow chancellor managed to change the mind of his protégé Long-Bailey, who was originally keen on striking a deal but switched sides in early May. Nick Brown and Andrew Fisher added to the fracas, convincing Corbyn that even if they secured an agreement they would not have the numbers to pass it. (The Tory chief whips, on the other hand, told Milne they were certain they could get it passed.)

Corbyn eventually pulled out of the talks a week before the European Parliament elections. Murphy described this as ‘the crucial moment’. ‘Had we done a deal with the Tories,’ she said, ‘we would have won the next election.’ Amy Jackson remarked, ‘We had a deal – and it was our side that sabotaged it, not theirs. They may have claimed that it would be disastrous to do a deal with the Tories. But our position was that nothing would tear us apart more than the Brexit issue. We needed it taken out of our hands before the election.’ Both staffers accepted that there was no way of knowing for sure whether a cross-party deal could have got through, not least because the whip’s office was actively opposed to it. But they argued that, even if it failed, the very fact of bringing the agreement to parliament would have undone Starmer’s strategy and allowed Labour to rebrand as a ‘respect the result’ party. Without that urgent step change, LOTO knew it was headed for a wipeout.

The European elections on 23 May 2019 were disastrous for both Labour and the Tories. Nigel Farage’s newly created Brexit Party came first with twenty-nine seats, followed by the Lib Dems on sixteen. Labour won ten while the Conservatives were reduced to four. The debate in the shadow cabinet quickly came to revolve around whether Labour should continue to advocate a second referendum ‘to stop a damaging Tory Brexit’, or whether it should now support one in all circumstances. Starmer argued forcefully in favour of the latter, along with Thornberry, Abbott and McDonnell. A number of ostensibly left-wing commentators backed them up in the pages of the Guardian.⁸⁴ Corbyn equivocated. Shortly after the election results he appeared to change the official Brexit policy, writing to MPs that ‘we are ready to support a public vote on any deal’;⁸⁵ yet in early June he began citing Labour’s Peterborough byelection victory as a reason to hold the line.⁸⁶ Some of his staffers urged him not to ‘betray the working class’ by capitulating to PV, while others felt that, having failed to resist the ratchet movement towards Remain, it was worse to dither than to make a decisive commitment to a public vote. In almost every shadow cabinet meeting over that summer, Starmer brought up the European elections as an indisputable reason to accelerate the policy shift, reminding Corbyn that Labour had not come first in Islington, and producing documents that highlighted the huge number of Londoners who supported a People’s Vote. Jackson fought back, telling the shadow Brexit secretary that ‘not even an A-level politics student would formulate a major policy position on the basis of a European election result’. Starmer responded to this remark by cutting off contact with her.

As a general election loomed and parliament remained gridlocked, Starmer, Fisher and McDonnell argued that Labour should support a second referendum in which the two options would be the principle of a soft Brexit versus Remain. The party, they said, should ask the public to decide between a non-existent deal, yet to be negotiated with Brussels, and the status quo. Corbyn should then pour all his energy into campaigning for the latter. Others in LOTO knew where any variant of this policy would lead them. One senior aide warned at the time that if Corbyn won a general election and then immediately called a referendum, it would cause a devastating rupture in the labour movement. Remain would win the public vote, its most reactionary supporters would rally, and they would use their increased political capital to stage a coup against the Left. A shadow cabinet member gave me their assessment of Starmer’s strategy: ‘Keir always thinks several steps ahead. His plan was, I’ll push for a People’s Vote and head into a general election with that policy. If we win the election, we’ll have a second referendum. If we win that, I’ll be the most popular politician in the country and in a position to challenge Jeremy. If we don’t win it, Jeremy will be a wounded beast and I’ll trample on his corpse.’

Enter Johnson

Corbyn’s media appearances suffered because of LOTO’s failure to resolve these internal disputes. When questioned on Brexit, he became evasive. The quality that distinguished him from other politicians – his ability to say what he really thought – had vanished, and the Starmer– McDonnell faction came to control the party messaging. By late July, once May had resigned and Boris Johnson had swept to power, the battle-lines for the upcoming general election were drawn. The left-populist approach to Brexit that Labour could have taken in 2016, and tried to take in 2017, had now been appropriated by the Conservatives. Labour were the establishment; the Tories were the insurgents. Labour was preoccupied with obscure parliamentary exercises; the Tories trumpeted their determination to fulfil the democratic mandate of the referendum. ‘The reality now’, Johnson thundered in parliament, ‘is that we are the party of the people. We are the party of the many, and they are the party of the few. We will take this country forwards, and they will take it backwards.’⁸⁷

Starmer and Corbyn clashed over how to respond to Johnson. Sir Keir argued that it was time to align with the Remain camp and announce that Labour would campaign for EU membership in any future referendum. The leader was more partial to Milne’s plan, set out in an 18 August memo, which called on Labour to recalibrate its 2017 strategy: break through the Brexit binary, it said, and present a ‘real challenge to the establishment and the elites – while painting Boris Johnson’s Tories as untrustworthy, dangerous and in the pockets of the super-rich’. Aware that Starmer would never stick to this script, LOTO decided to remove him from the list of shadow cabinet election spokespeople.⁸⁸

But despite Milne’s efforts, the attempt to reclaim the populist energy from Johnson was bulldozed by two developments in which Starmer played a crucial role. The first was the Benn Act, brought to parliament on 4 September. This was a plan drawn up by Starmer in collaboration with a group of Tory rebels – led by Philip Hammond, David Gauke and Oliver Letwin – to delay Brexit beyond the scheduled date of 31 October. Although LOTO favoured the idea of staving off a no-deal exit, Starmer ensured that Corbyn and his team played no role in its execution. The legislation was instead put in Hilary Benn’s name and framed as an initiative of cross-party Remainers. This immediately punctured Labour’s anti-establishment rhetoric and legitimized Johnson’s ‘people versus parliament’ narrative. The new PM labelled it the ‘Surrender Act’ and expelled the twenty-one Conservative MPs who helped to vote it through – stating that he refused to be intimidated by ‘enemies of the people’.

The second development that undermined Labour’s election plan was the government’s prorogation of parliament. On 28 August it emerged that Johnson was planning to suspend the Commons session for five weeks, ostensibly to prevent the establishment from thwarting Brexit. In fact, the ensuing sequence of events had been carefully choreographed by Johnson’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings. He told his counterparts in LOTO that the courts would inevitably rule against the suspension, and Labour would join the rebel backbench Tories in welcoming their judgement. This would further polarize the nation, casting the judiciary, the liberal press and the bulk of parliament as aloof and antidemocratic. Cummings predicted that once this rift had opened up, Labour would have no choice but to swerve fully behind Remain. Johnson would construe the next election as the sole means to break the impasse, and storm to victory by winning marginal Leave seats.

And so it went. The Supreme Court invalidated the prorogation on 24 September. Starmer responded to the crisis by foregrounding the Brexit dichotomy – stating that everyone must now choose ‘which side they are on’ – rather than diminishing it as Milne had hoped.⁸⁹ As growing numbers of Labour MPs expressed their intent to campaign for Remain, LOTO decided it had no choice but to accept a second referendum in all circumstances so as to avoid heading into the next election with a hopelessly divided party. The main aim of Corbyn, Jackson, Milne and Schneider then became to settle on a version of the Starmer–McDonnell plan that was less explicitly Remainist. As an alternative, they proposed that Labour should negotiate a deal with Brussels and call a referendum in which it would face off against continued EU membership. MPs would be able to make their own decision about which side to support, and Corbyn would stay neutral. McDonnell accepted this compromise. Starmer – backed by the PV campaign – held out. He continued to argue that Labour should commit to campaigning for Remain, up until the leadership’s policy was approved by the membership at the 2019 conference, at which point he finally gave way.

The Brexit election

This was the winding route by which Labour arrived at what one of Corbyn’s senior advisers described as ‘the most stupid and incoherent position that any party has offered to the country on a major political question’. ‘Keir set us on a highway to that position,’ the aide continued. ‘His aim from 2018 was to keep us locked into opposition, to maintain a united Labour front against Brexit, and then to nudge us towards a second referendum.’ On its own terms, the party’s final Brexit policy was impossible to sell to the electorate. But it became even more damaging when Johnson announced on 17 October that he had signed a draft agreement with Brussels – one that seemingly resolved intra-Tory disputes by removing Britain from the single market and customs union without the need for a backstop. Labour was then faced with an election that revolved around choice between Johnson’s bold, ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal, and Corbyn’s notional plan to negotiate a withdrawal bill that most of his own party would campaign against.

Milne and Schneider had anticipated this prospect. Since the Benn Act was passed, they had been arguing for a general election at the earliest opportunity. It was better to go into a vote where both parties were offering a hypothetical deal, they said, than one where Corbyn’s speculative offer was set against Johnson’s concrete one. An early election would allow Labour to present itself as the only option for avoiding no deal, whereas a delay would intensify the perception that the party was frustrating the will of the people. The LOTO strategists made this case repeatedly in meetings with Starmer and the whips, but each time they encountered stubborn opposition. Brown trotted out his default line that a PLP rebellion would erupt if Corbyn tried to legislate for an election, while Starmer made a highly technical argument for delaying the vote which fellow shadow cabinet members described as ‘complete legal bullshit’.⁹⁰ For his opponents in the shadow cabinet, Starmer’s real motive was obvious: he was determined to prolong the parliamentary stalemate on the mistaken assumption that it would force more MPs to back a People’s Vote. The Labour Right continued to block an election up until 29 October, when the support of the smaller parties made it unavoidable.

That left the opposition in a dire state. The success of 2017 was largely owed to Corbyn’s upbeat campaign: presenting a hopeful vision of the future rather than fixating on the evils of the Tories. Two years later, the coordinates had changed, and Labour no longer had a positive message. As Murray recounted, ‘We’d said no to May’s deal, no to a joint deal, no to Johnson’s deal, no to no deal and no to an election. What were we saying yes to?’ Perhaps the clearest indication of this shift came shortly before the December vote, when LOTO saw the data from focus groups commissioned by the party. It showed that almost nobody had heard of Labour’s alternative Brexit deal – reflecting Starmer’s blanket refusal to mention a ‘Labour Brexit’ in press interviews, even when the lines were fed to him by the leadership. To the general public, Labour lacked a clear plan and a forward-looking offer. Though many of the social democratic policies in its 2019 manifesto were popular, they were undermined by its recalcitrance on Brexit.⁹¹ If the party could not come up with a solution to the political-constitutional crisis dominating the headlines, how could it be trusted to lead a government?

Johnson, on the other hand, built his campaign around two straightforward pledges: deliver Brexit, and fund education and healthcare. He explained how one flowed from the other. Freed from the political paralysis induced by Remainers, Britain could finally turn to its neglected domestic issues and build a new, nationalist, post-austerity settlement. If the 2016 vote against the EU was a displacement of popular antipathy towards Westminster, Johnson’s electoral strategy refocused this antagonism on its real object. Parliament had become an obstacle, he said; Labour was using it to weaken popular sovereignty, as under Blair and Brown; only a muscular executive could bypass this arcane institution and return power to the masses. It was a programme to which Corbyn had no rejoinder, thanks to Starmer’s obstructionist efforts. When the vote was held on 12 December, Labour lost sixty seats, bringing its tally to the lowest level since 1935. All but two of the constituencies that switched from Labour to the Conservatives had voted to leave. In areas that supported Leave by 60 per cent or more, the swing from Labour to the Conservatives was 16.5 per cent. In those with an equivalent strength of support for Remain, the swing from the Conservatives to Labour was only 3.5 per cent. ‘There is no hiding from the overall result’, Starmer tweeted. ‘We must now reflect; but we must also rebuild.’ In an interview on the Today programme, he blamed the loss on LOTO’s decision to sideline him in the weeks leading up to the ballot.

Of course, in the final months of 2019, Starmer was perfectly open to winning the election for Labour. If the party had entered government on a People’s Vote platform, Starmer would have become the leader of an invigorated Remain campaign, placing himself in an ideal position to challenge Corbyn for the premiership. But he was also sanguine about the prospect of an electoral meltdown. By that winter, he knew that the chances of a Corbyn victory were vanishingly slim – and behind the scenes, Starmer’s leadership bid was already underway.

3
The Candidate

After the election loss, the commentators that advocated the turn towards Remain were quick to downplay its significance. Within minutes of the exit poll, Paul Mason tweeted that this was ‘a victory of the old over the young, racists over people of colour, selfishness over the planet’. He was echoed by others on the Left, who claimed that Labour’s problem was not its EU stance, but the influence of a powerful electoral bloc which it could not hope to win: ageing homeowners from monocultural northern towns whose political convictions were shaped by the two-pronged fear of immigrants and falling property prices. Brexit was not a proletarian revolt, they said; it was the pet-project of this reactionary clique. Hence, the class struggle was better served by retaining the support of precarious workers in urban centres than by courting an embittered layer on the periphery. Inveterately attached to their comfortable homes and imperial nostalgia, the ‘Red Wall’ never would have supported Corbyn anyway.¹

In one of the most wide-ranging retrospectives on Corbynism, the political theorist Jeremy Gilbert also sought to minimize the impact of the European policy. ‘Ultimately,’ he wrote of the Brexit impasse, ‘there was really no good way out of it.’ Although he conceded that Labour ‘would have lost fewer seats’ had it rejected a second referendum, he offered a simple response to the ‘pro-Brexit hard left’: ‘we tried it their way’. From 2017 to 2018, he argued, Labour held out against the Remainers for no political gain. Its switching sides was unavoidable given the views of the membership and PLP. Instead of fighting this unwinnable war, the leadership should have directed its energies elsewhere: towards building a grassroots movement capable of rebutting hostile media coverage. It should also have recognized that Corbyn was never the right leader, lacking the ‘common-touch-charisma’ that every twenty-first-century progressive politician must possess. His anti-imperialist politics were ‘unrealistic’, unpopular and partly responsible for the party’s downfall.² John McDonnell, on the other hand, was ‘the most talented radical politician of his generation, and a Northerner to boot’, who may have checked the Red Wall’s disenchantment if deployed more effectively.³

Gilbert’s Brexit fatalism was reiterated by Owen Jones, who wrote that Labour had ‘no real choice’ but to back a second referendum: ‘Whatever decisions the party made, it would not have ended well.’ For Jones, the pivotal element in 2019 was not Brexit, but Corbyn and Milne’s media strategy. Labour should have ‘avoid[ed] pointless controversies which delivered no political gains’ – abandoning its anti-war internationalism and prioritizing domestic economic policy. It should have improved its ‘administrative expertise ‘, swapped its idealism for a ‘tactical approach’, and recognized that the Left needs to look ‘serious’ about securing power. Each of these qualities, Jones argued, was embodied by McDonnell: ‘Labour’s lost leader’, who would have surely led the party to victory had he been at the helm. By contrast, the incompetence and inflexibility of Corbyn’s team was what sealed their electoral fate.⁴

The retreat from Corbynism

It is worth examining these arguments in turn, not just because of their relevance to the Brexit narrative laid out in the previous section, but because Labour’s transition from Corbyn to Starmer was enabled by their underlying assumptions. None of these commentators is a self-identified Starmerite. (Of the three, Mason is the only one who voted for him in 2020, though he has since distanced himself from the leadership.) Whereas he and Jones openly defend Labour-establishment positions, Gilbert is an independent spirit. Hailing from a section of the Gramscian intellectual left, he self-identifies with Stuart Hall’s Soundings magazine and K-Punk’s Mark Fisher. Politically, the main argument of Gilbert’s openDemocracy five-parter was a critique of the narrowness of the Corbynists’ post-2010 ‘austerity’ narrative – viewed as a chiliastic Leninist carpe diem/war of manoeuvre, unwilling to criticize the New Labour years, when what was needed was a longer-range Gramscian picture that cast the past forty years as a bad direction for working people. Yet, despite the obvious differences between these writers, their collective diagnosis of the election loss represents a strand of opinion that contributed to the party’s post-Corbyn makeover, convincing swathes of Labour members that Sir Keir was the right successor. It is a contemporary analogue to the ‘new revisionism’ identified by Ralph Miliband in 1985, whereby serial defeats prompted a ‘pronounced retreat from some fundamental socialist positions’ among left-wing intellectuals, who located the route out of a crisis in a movement towards the political centre.⁵

Starting with Mason and his left-Europhile cohort – the idea that Red Wall Leavers were motivated by xenophobia and investment in the property market deserves closer scrutiny. As to the first charge, the majority of Brexit voters did not cite immigration as their primary reason for opposing EU membership. Polls showed that by far the most prominent motivation for backing Leave was ‘the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’, surpassing concerns about migration by sixteen percentage points.⁶ Some voters were susceptible to UKIP’s anti-migrant rhetoric during the referendum campaign, but the idea that the majority embraced an obdurate and consistent ‘racism’ is difficult to sustain. A YouGov report found that ‘despite stereotypes about those in the Red Wall, social attitudes there match the rest of the country’, with no notable distinction between the fabled ‘Workington Man’ and the average British citizen on issues such as multiculturalism, migration and transgender rights.⁷ Indeed, given the voting trends from 2017, a simple question presents itself: if northern Brexiters formed a homogeneous group of bigots, how did Corbyn win a sizeable portion of this demographic while explicitly ruling out a reduction in immigration numbers?

The same query applies to homeowners. The 2017 election saw Corbyn significantly increase the Labour vote share among property holders (with the vote among mortgaged owners jumping from 31 per cent to 40 per cent since 2015, outright owners from 22 per cent to 30 per cent). The party also made gains among pensioners and people in the fifty-five to sixty-four age bracket.⁸ In light of this, the idea that Brexit was less decisive in 2019 than a rigid ‘Red Wall identity’ – which melds generational politics with propertied interests – relies on an erasure of the results from two years earlier. ‘Claiming that the north is turning Tory because we’re all homeowners is as facile an argument as saying all Londoners are part of the metropolitan elite’, as one analyst noted.⁹ Those who benefited from Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme have hardly been insulated from the effects of crumbling infrastructure, depressed wages or gutted public services. To say that their material interests have diverged from Labour’s programme is to isolate the rental market as the sole determinant of political orientation. It is also to claim that, in one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world, the poorest region is a crypto-stronghold of the ruling class.¹⁰

Similar paradoxes arise from Jones and Gilbert’s propositions. Both of them blame the election result on Corbyn’s personal qualities: his unseriousness, his stubbornness, his lack of strategic insight. Both present McDonnell as the antidote to these shortcomings, so that – in a strange inversion – the man who supported the strategically disastrous Remain policy is cast as more ‘serious’ and ‘competent’ than the man who opposed it. Lionization of McDonnell, in turn, requires them to describe the second referendum position as inevitable, which means ignoring the contingent processes that led up to that point: Starmer’s manoeuvring around the Coventry speech, McDonnell’s centrist coup in LOTO, and their joint sabotage of the April 2019 negotiations. Since both Jones and Gilbert believe that anti-imperialism was a distraction from the urgent task of gaining power, they discount the potential of Corbyn’s attempt to formulate an internationalist Brexit policy that could have transcended the Leave/Remain schism. Just as Mason encouraged Labour to bolster its credibility by supporting NATO and nuclear weapons, Jones and Gilbert arrive at the inexorable conclusion that, in a hostile media environment, progressive foreign policy must be ditched in order to receive a fair hearing on welfare and nationalization.

This position presupposes that, if only Labour had made further concessions to the Right, it could have staved off the relentless campaign to delegitimize Corbyn’s leadership – when, in fact, there is nothing that Corbyn could have done to placate the editors at the Guardian or BBC. No amount of savvy PR or pro-war sentiment could have overcome their implacable hostility. The only option was to propose bold policies, like a progressive Leave deal, that could break through the negative press coverage. As Karie Murphy remarked, the defeat of 2019 ‘was never about the media strategy; it was about the political direction of the party’. The first could never be effective if the second was misjudged.

Granted, it would be equally naïve to claim that Labour’s only problem was its capitulation to the People’s Vote campaign. Corbynism had to contend with a number of damaging secular trends, some of which were not confined to Britain: the atomization of the working class wrought by deindustrialization and globalization; the decline of trade union militancy; the rise of Scottish separatism; the Tories’ populist transformation; and the intense hostility of mainstream media outlets including the national broadcaster. Each of these hurdles would have existed in the absence of the Brexit debacle (though they had to varying degrees been circumvented in 2017). But it is beyond doubt that the question of Europe came to aggravate – and symbolize – such structural issues, representing the tension between masses and elites, periphery and centre, media simulation and everyday experience. As a result, it was impossible for Labour to develop a bold left-populist platform capable of confronting these barriers once it had sided with Remain. The attempt to do so ended up discrediting left populism itself, since the party had proven that, when it came to such fundamental questions, it was unwilling to break with the status quo. Gilbert may be right that the route to a Corbyn government lay in a long-range Gramscian struggle to rupture the New Labour settlement; but he does not explain how the party could have pursued this hegemonic project while also allowing Campbell and Mandelson to dictate its Brexit policy. In any plausible scenario, the latter would surely have undermined the former.

The Remainer accounts of Corbynism therefore rely on several mistaken premises: a caricatured view of Leave voters, a historical amnesia around 2017, an oversized emphasis on Corbyn’s personal ‘incompetence’, an assumption that there was no alternative to supporting a People’s Vote, and a misplaced hope that the media could be mollified by a more hawkish foreign policy. From these bases, various conclusions about the post-Corbyn era followed. The first was that a reckoning with the party’s Westminster-centrism was unnecessary. If the Remain stance was inevitable, and the northern heartlands irrecoverable, then there was no need to challenge the hegemony of the faction which promoted that policy. Accusations that Starmer and McDonnell were out of touch or strategically inept could be brushed off. The second was that a more capable media performer must lead the party: someone who was slick, authoritative, smooth-talking, and willing to bend their principles to avoid ‘pointless controversies’ over issues such as Israel–Palestine. After half a decade of constant firefighting, it was tempting to think that greater ‘tactical compromise’ with the media and the PLP could elevate Labour’s prospects. Only a unifying figure, it was believed, could end the party’s civil war and take the fight to the Tories.

This tallied with the third conclusion: that ‘administrative expertise’ had become more important than political substance. Corbyn may have played a valuable role in shifting Labour’s political centre of gravity, but his ideological purism left the organization in such dire straits that an effective manager was needed to restore public confidence. Now that Corbynites made up the bulk of the membership, they could ensure that the party’s social democratic platform was preserved, while anointing a new leader who would hone its communications and improve its bureaucratic efficiency. As Mason argued, ‘When people see Keir Starmer leading they’ll realize what was missing – professionalism, prudential principle, resilience, communicative ability.’¹¹

For many on the Labour Left, this was the intuitive response to the events of 12 December, whether or not they had engaged with the analyses of Mason, Gilbert or Jones. It was precisely for this reason that Starmer could win such a resounding victory in the subsequent leadership election, beating Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy with more votes than Corbyn won in 2015. His campaign was founded on the promise to keep most of the 2017 manifesto commitments while simultaneously uniting the party, pleasing the media, junking international solidarity and foregrounding his lawyerly competence. In that sense, Starmer’s platform owed much to Corbynism’s McDonnellite tendency, which ditched left-populist internationalism for a more cautious and conciliatory approach to winning economic justice. The QC’s flagship pledge – to ‘end factionalism’ – tapped into the exhaustion many Labour activists felt after years of rebutting smears and managing concocted crises. If they could gain some respite by watering down their socialist convictions, that seemed like a reasonable trade-off. Almost half of those who had supported Corbyn in the previous two leadership elections voted for Starmer this time.¹²

Sir Keir deflected questions about his role in the 2019 meltdown by exploiting this desire for unity. ‘We as a party can mope around, head in hands, arguing with each other, pointing fingers about who’s to blame for this that and the other,’ he said, ‘or we could decide the next four years of our history is for us – we can pull together and shape what happens next.’¹³ Since the majority of Labour MPs and broadsheet opinionators were determined to pin the defeat on Corbyn alone, this refusal to play the blame game sounded like a courageous stand against factionalism. Yet it was also a convenient way for Starmer to elide the role of his own faction in the election loss. As Owen Hatherley wrote in February 2020, ‘I will admit I couldn’t quite believe that the response to a disaster in Brexit-voting Northern seats would be a wave of enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer, QC and increasingly hard Remainer, but it isn’t senseless – it’s based on trying to find someone principled, reliable and I daresay slightly boring.’ His campaign ‘was smart in promoting Starmer to a generation who have seen two horrendous crushings of socialist hopes – first in the mid-1980s and now in the late 2010s – and couldn’t bear another’.¹⁴

Building out from the Blairites

Yet if Starmer’s popularity grew partly out of this conformist strain within the Corbyn movement, it was also the result of years-long preparation by the Labour Right. After Owen Smith’s leadership challenge collapsed in 2016, Morgan McSweeney – the New Labourite official who ran Liz Kendall’s campaign in 2015 – began to put together a plan. His allies would not waste their energy on plotting another coup. Instead, they would aim to bring all of Labour’s anti-Corbyn elements into an alliance that could reclaim the party once the leader had stepped down. The vehicle for this project would be McSweeney’s quasi–think tank Labour Together, co-run by Lisa Nandy, Jon Cruddas and Steve Reed. Some of the senior figures in Labour Together overlapped with those in Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour advocacy group, established in 2009 to affirm the values of ‘family, faith and flag’, as well as the PLP’s Tribune caucus.¹⁵ Labour Together’s programme combined the free-market policies of the Blair–Brown years – updated for the era of renewed state intervention – with Glasman’s social conservatism. Its funding came from two ultra-rich businessmen, Trevor Chinn and Martin Taylor. Chinn is a private-equity broker and donor to several Labour politicians, including Blair, Kendall, Watson, Smith and Reeves, as well as the former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron.¹⁶ He has been a major donor to both Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel,¹⁷ and he has lobbied Labour to oppose raising taxes for the wealthy.¹⁸ Taylor is a Mayfair hedge fund manager who gave £600,000 to Labour under Ed Miliband and bankrolled the right-wing group Labour Tomorrow in 2016.¹⁹

The singular aim of Labour Together was ‘to build out from the Blairite base’, as one insider put it to me. After commissioning reams of private polling during 2016 and 2017, McSweeney developed a theory that approximately 60 per cent of Labour members were committed ‘ideologues’ – 30 per cent aligned with the Left, 30 per cent with the Right. The remaining 40 per cent were ‘idealists’, driven by vague moral principles as opposed to concrete policy positions. This cohort had voted for Corbyn out of a spontaneous revulsion at austerity, rather than any firm political commitments. The Blairites, McSweeney determined, could reclaim the party by appealing to the ethical instincts of the 40 per cent. Its next candidate couldn’t be as openly reactionary as Kendall; he or she would have to be adaptable enough to win this swing constituency.

Starmer was ideally suited to this role. During the prorogation crisis of autumn 2019, Lib Dem and Scottish Nationalist MPs had approached the QC to ask if he would lead a national unity government to stop Brexit. (Starmer refused, recognizing that the enterprise was unrealistic given the divisions in parliament.) At the same time, the shadow Brexit secretary had been meeting regularly with Mason and Parker, who were advising him on how to frame his leadership bid after the impending election. This demonstrated his broad appeal: commanding the respect of MPs from other parties while also appealing to the Momentum-affiliated base.

Dinner diplomacy

Throughout September and October, Labour Together morphed into a Starmer campaign machine. The group hosted a series of dinners at a west London hotel, where Starmer’s shadow cabinet in waiting was summoned to devise a new centrist platform fit for the 2020s. Those in attendance included McSweeney, Chinn, Nandy, Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson, plus the three leading intellectuals of the Blue Labour movement: Glasman, Adrian Pabst and Jonathan Rutherford. Also present were Claire Ainsley, the executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and a select group of journalists whom Starmer regaled with long anecdotes about his achievements as DPP. One guest at the Labour Together dinners told me that McSweeney’s entourage were also eager for Nandy to run for leader, in the hope that she would take votes from the Corbynite candidate and place second on a Blue Labourist agenda, dealing a further blow to the party’s Left. Out of these discussions came the core tenets of Starmer’s leadership campaign: an anti-austerity bottom line to win the membership (articulated in his ‘Ten Pledges’, based on the 2017 manifesto policies), along with a clear emphasis on Labour unity.²⁰

Labour Together quietly built support for Starmer among MPs, trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties. Seven sub-groups were established to cover fundraising and nominations.²¹ Starmer attended biweekly meetings with Tom Kibasi, a former McKinsey management consultant turned director of the IPPR, who helped to develop his communications strategy. Kibasi made a grid on which he compiled data on the key Labour constituencies Starmer needed to target, and began to craft a message that could capture them. Job offers were made to some of Corbyn’s former staffers, with the policy adviser Mark Simpson and the former chief of staff Simon Fletcher agreeing to defect to Starmer’s team. On the day of the 2019 election, McSweeney told journalists privately that ‘we’ve already got this sewn up’. Polling conducted immediately after the vote showed that Starmer was by far the most popular prospective candidate. He soft-launched his campaign with a Guardian interview on 18 December and drafted in a former Owen Smith staffer, Alex Barros-Curtis, as his head of compliance.²² In early January he released a rousing Starmer-for-leader video written and directed by Kibasi, in which a Yorkshire miner praises Starmer’s legal advocacy, Helen Steel recalls his work on the McLibel case, and Doreen Lawrence reads a rose-tinted account of his CPS record, which claims that he ‘stood up to the powerful’, ‘[took] on the Murdoch press for phone hacking’ and ‘prioritized changing prosecution guidelines on violence against women’.²³

If these public supporters gave Starmer a left-wing sheen, his private donors told another story. Chinn and Taylor gave him a combined £145,000. Waheed Alli, the investment banker and media mogul, handed Starmer £100,000. Clive Hollick, another investment banker who served as chief executive of the media group that owned the Daily Express and Daily Star, chipped in £50,000. Peter Coates, a permanent feature on the Sunday Times rich-list who founded a successful online gambling company, donated £25,000. More modest sums came from Rajesh Agrawal, London’s deputy mayor for business, and Jonathan Kestenbaum, the chief operating officer of RIT Capital Partners. Starmer also received thousands of pounds from property developers and real-estate companies.²⁴ Yet none of this could dent his reputation, as he exploited transparency rules to delay the publication of such interests until after the leadership election.²⁵

Long-Bailey’s campaign, stunted by its late start and her lack of charisma, was no match for this operation. While Starmer had been strategizing to seize the leadership since September 2019, she had expended all her energy on the general election campaign and was unprepared to join the race. She went on holiday over the Christmas break and told colleagues that she was reluctant to run. Ian Lavery indicated his willingness to stand in her place, but he was dissuaded by fellow members of the Socialist Campaign Group – the association of left-wing MPs who, under McDonnell’s sway, were set on nominating Long-Bailey. When she belatedly announced her candidacy on 6 January, Starmer’s victory was already assured. Billed as the ‘Corbyn continuity’ option, Long-Bailey in fact represented the McDonnell school of realpolitik. On almost every point of principle she conceded to the Right. At a hustings organized by the Jewish Labour Movement she declared herself a ‘Zionist’ and suggested that it was antisemitic to criticize the Nakba;²⁶ in a subsequent campaign video she appeared to validate the view that immigrants are partly responsible for deteriorating public services;²⁷ and in a Guardian article she praised ‘progressive patriotism’ but offered few clues as to what that meant in practice.²⁸ Predictably, these climbdowns did nothing to stop the barrage of media attacks on Long-Bailey. Their only effect was to increase Starmer’s popularity; for if every contender were proposing a retreat from Corbynism, then the smartly dressed barrister seemed like the safest bet. On 4 April it was announced that Starmer had won with 56 per cent, or 275,780 votes, to Long-Bailey’s 28 per cent, while Angela Rayner had trounced Richard Burgon in the deputy leadership contest.²⁹ The counterrevolution was in motion. With the Corbyn hiatus over, Labour would no longer be the party of the Left.

4
The Leader

Just as he set a different goal for each year of his DPP term (as part of his fixation with ‘process’) Starmer had a time-line in mind for his leadership of the Labour Party. Step one was to build trust by appearing as apolitical as possible. For the first six months of his leadership, he would abstain on Tory legislation as a default. This was intended to convince the public that Labour was no longer a band of dogmatists but a serious party of government, rejecting an ideological view of the state for a sensible, managerial one. Once trust had been established, step two was to articulate a positive vision for the country – framing this in terms of ‘fundamental values’ such as family, security and patriotism. Glasman’s back-to-basics conservatism would supplant both New Labour cosmopolitanism and Corbynite internationalism. After that, the party would finally move onto step three: describing how such values should be translated into policies.¹

In a victory speech delivered via social media, Starmer announced that in the context of the pandemic, Labour would ‘engage constructively with the government’. Rather than ‘scoring party-political points or making impossible demands’,² he sought refinements to Johnson’s public-health measures: clearer communication from Downing Street, a more targeted furlough scheme and a transparent exit strategy from the first lockdown. He was slow to call for an effective test-and-trace system, had few qualms about keeping non-essential workplaces in the construction and manufacturing sectors open for business, rebuffed demands from party activists for rent cancellation in the rented-housing sector, and did not oppose Conservative attempts to force schoolteachers back into unsafe classrooms – although in the autumn of 2020 he sided with the government’s scientific advisers in urging a second ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown as hospital admissions rose again.

If Starmer’s constructive opposition spoke to the immediate demands of the Covid crisis, it was also a throwback to his CPS tenure. His instinct in both cases was to act as a willing servant of the government and promote its agenda. As party leader, this meant supporting Tory policies in principle but querying their means of implementation. ‘They make a decision, we will follow that and we will reinforce their communications’, while also ‘challenging the government where they’ve got it wrong’, he explained to Andrew Marr.³ His opening gambit was to centralize control over party messaging. After the 2015 leadership election, Corbyn had spent his first weeks consulting each shadow cabinet member about what they wanted to achieve in their departments and channelling that information upward to LOTO policymakers. Starmer did the opposite, informing his frontbench that their autonomy was minimal. All policy proposals and criticisms of the Tories were henceforth to come from the leader’s office, which rigorously vetted the interventions of shadow ministers.

As we have seen, the national media were charmed by Starmer’s ‘forensic criticism’, describing it as serious, competent and grown-up. The risk, of course, was that by persisting in his refusal to present a genuine alternative to the government well after the first wave of Covid had receded, his criticisms ultimately came across as lawyerly nit-picking: a perception that Johnson deftly exploited from across the dispatch box. As his approval ratings slumped after the first few months, the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush wrote that ‘Starmer has often seemed more focused on scoring points off a Prime Minister he disliked, and less on a strategic attack of the government as a whole’.⁴

‘Moral socialism’

A bureaucrat by training and disposition, Starmer has lacked the political footwork to intervene effectively in the news cycle. Temperamentally ill-suited to making difficult judgement calls, in fact often cripplingly indecisive, by early 2021 he was reportedly given briefing papers by his staffers with just one option on them, so that he would not have to choose between alternative proposals. When it comes to major policy questions, he prefers to defer to close advisers: initially Morgan McSweeney, who was installed as chief of staff, and speechwriter Chris Ward, plus the communications director, Ben Nunn, his deputy Paul Ovenden, and Jenny Chapman, previously the vice-chair of the New Labour pressure group Progress. Helene Reardon-Bond has stayed on at LOTO, spearheading a programme to draft in ‘expert volunteers’ who can be consulted on key policy areas (though as one of her colleagues put it to me, ‘These so-called experts are really just lobbyists; they don’t have anything useful to say’).

Perhaps the most significant figure to whom Starmer has outsourced decision-making is Claire Ainsley, whom he appointed as the party’s director of policy in April 2020, entrusting her to create a platform that could win back disillusioned voters in the Red Wall and Midlands. Much of Ainsley’s electoral strategy was formulated in her book, The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes (2018). In it, she provides an account of the decline of social democratic parties in the Global North following the displacement of the industrial proletariat by a ‘more disparate, more atomised’ working class, and proposes a route back to power.

First, writes Ainsley, progressives must accept that ‘class warfare is dead as a narrative, as it doesn’t resonate for people’; nor does an ‘ideological view of the state’, focused on issues like privatization or democratization. Instead of clinging to these passé perspectives, parties should ‘start with what the public think’.

There are values that are deeply ingrained in British society and that cut across class that all politicians would do well to understand … Basically, parties should move closer to where the public is, rather than expect the public to come to them.

To explain ‘where the public is’, Ainsley cites a survey from early 2015, in which a sample group of 1,771 people were shown a list of twenty-eight different values and asked to pick their favourites. The data showed that family, hard work, fairness and decency were the most popular. Therefore, she concludes, the way to resuscitate social democracy is simple. Parties must develop policies that harmonize with these ‘core values’. If the centre-left is seen as aloof, this impression can be remedied by activating the ‘moral foundations’ of the electorate. If the working class is atomized, it can be reunited by an organization that understands these ethical imperatives.⁵

There is a striking contrast between the ambition of this project and the measures designed to fulfil it. To reflect the value of family, writes Ainsley, social democratic parties should offer one additional bank holiday per year and apply a ‘family test’ to legislation (much like that introduced to government departments by David Cameron). To demonstrate their respect for hard work and fairness they should eschew significant redistribution of wealth, for which there is no public appetite, and instead introduce lower and higher rates of unemployment benefit ‘so that those who have made contributions through previous earnings receive a greater entitlement than those who do not have previous contributions’. There should also be curbs on immigration and a strong law-and-order offering, with schools made to teach ‘British values that put the rule of law at the centre’.⁶

Ainsley’s book had a major impact on Starmer’s thinking because it corresponded with what has been described as his ‘moral socialism’.⁷ Pogrund and Maguire write that over the course of the leadership campaign, it became clear that Starmer’s political orientation ‘was less a fully formed world view than it was a more inchoate moral compulsion’. When Paul Mason asked Starmer why he wanted to be leader, he responded, ‘Because if I see something wrong in society, I can’t turn my head and walk on the other side of the road. I’ve got to do something about it.’⁸ A historical inheritance from low-church Protestantism, the ethical case for socialism has been a linchpin of the Labour Party since its foundation – ‘a kind of domesticated national voice of conscience’, observed the political theorist Tom Nairn, ‘forever indignant at the “excesses” of capitalism and at the iniquitous conduct of the very rich and the very poor alike’. This bequest, Nairn argued, produced a ‘sentimental socialism, founded not upon any idea of what the world is objectively like but upon the conviction of its wrongness and injustice. Socialism, hence, was apprehended primarily as a moral crusade propelled by emotions of outrage at injustice and suffering.’⁹ This is the clearest lens through which to view Starmer’s pious statements about his politics (‘I have always been motivated by a burning desire to tackle inequality and injustice, to stand up for the powerless against the powerful. That’s my socialism’).¹⁰ Just as Labour Together could scientifically determine the values of the party faithful, so would LOTO listen to the public and give them what they want. Starmer would sermonize about the concerns of ‘ordinary people’ and regain the trust of those who had absconded to the Tories.

Yet one of the remarkable things about Ainsley’s argument is that, in a book that claims to show how Labour can win elections, many of her policy ideas are borrowed directly from the Conservatives – prompting the reader to wonder why it is worth voting them out in the first place. It is not merely a lack of political imagination that leads the author to mimic Iain Duncan Smith on welfare or Priti Patel on immigration. It is a result of her methodology, which, fixated on focus groups and surveys, assumes that ‘good politics’ means mirroring back to the public what they already think. For Ainsley, the electorate have a set of pre-existing values which politicians can either adopt or ignore. These moral instincts are figured as innate components of the British psyche, not features that can be altered or affected by political interventions. Labour’s task, by extension, is to translate such truisms into policies that will overcome class divisions and galvanize the broadest cross-section of voters.

This approach can be read as the opposite of Corbynism in two respects. First, it locks Labour into fighting on the Tories’ terrain. Whereas Corbyn tried to reshape Britain’s ideological consensus by rejecting austerity and migrant-baiting, Ainsley’s method is to reify it and conform to it. The aim is not to change or instil values, but to ‘activate’, ‘trigger’ or ‘appeal’ to them – which means that progressive political formations invariably end up legitimizing the talking points of their opponents. Second, it conceives the working class as an object rather than a subject. While Corbyn attempted to re-engage people in the electoral process by increasing their class power – through trade unionism and community organizing – Ainsley replaces such practical measures with a singular focus on political messaging. Workers can no longer speak for themselves; they must be spoken to.

Throttling the Left

In parallel with this ideological pivot, Starmer remorselessly bore down on the Labour Left. Although he repeatedly promised to stop ‘looking internally’ and start ‘facing the country’, he in fact remained myopically focused on the party apparatus, using rule changes and disciplinary procedures to crack down on socialists of any stripe.¹¹ While Starmer may have struggled to set out a convincing public message, his managerial skills proved effective in prosecuting this internal campaign. Not only would Labour’s new sachem refuse to oppose the Tories; he would wage war on anyone who did – cementing the return to centrist respectability and ruling out any recurrence of the Corbyn ascendency.

In the event that Labour politicians dared to vote against the government, Starmer told Nick Brown to formally reprimand them, dramatically increasing the sanctions for breaking a one-line whip. Aware that this could cause them to be deselected ahead of the next general election, some MPs were forced to seek legal advice from their trade union representatives (with one describing Starmer’s tactics as ‘intimidation plain and simple’).¹² Starmer told the Socialist Campaign Group that by agreeing to abstain they would gain more influence over future policy decisions. That influence never materialized. Instead, in autumn 2021 the leadership began sending threatening letters to socialist MPs and party activists, placing them ‘under investigation’ for often unspecified breaches of conduct. Alex Barros-Curtis, who worked on Starmer’s campaign before becoming Labour’s executive director of legal affairs, set about expelling members with loose affiliations to ‘proscribed’ left-wing groups.¹³ The PLP nomination threshold for leadership contenders was raised in an attempt to block future left-wing leadership candidates, and the prospect of a left majority on the NEC curtailed through the introduction of new selection processes. An internal restructuring programme meanwhile saw an exodus of progressive staffers, abolishing the Community Organising Unit, established in 2018 to facilitate grassroots mobilization around local issues.

Upon his election Starmer asserted that tackling anti-Jewish prejudice in Labour would be his ‘first priority’, yet since then the leadership has consistently proven itself more interested in weeding out Jewish critics of Israel than actual antisemites. During the Corbyn years, only 0.3 per cent of Labour members were accused of antisemitism, and only 0.05 per cent were sanctioned for it following detailed investigations by the then general secretary Jennie Formby.¹⁴ Assessing the accusations of institutional Judaeophobia that circulated in the media, the Home Affairs Select Committee wrote, ‘Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party, and a number of revelations regarding inappropriate social media content, there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.’¹⁵ Corbyn himself has an extensive record of campaigning against antisemitism: signing Early Day Motions on the issue, fighting neo-Nazis during the Battle of Wood Green, spearheading campaigns to save Jewish cemeteries, championing the cause of Yemeni Jewish refugees, and dramatically improving Labour’s antisemitism complaints procedures. Yet these inconvenient details were ignored by most commentators, who responded to his support for Palestinian self-determination with a string of cynical accusations: that he had ‘declared war on the Jews’, that he posed an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in the UK’, and that he would ‘reopen Auschwitz’ were he to become prime minister.¹⁶ When pollsters asked the British public what proportion of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism, the average guess was 34 per cent: more than three hundred times the actual figure.¹⁷

After Corbyn’s defeat, the major media outlets were clear that they would not stop the smear campaign unless Labour declared maximal support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Starmer, once he took the reins, duly cemented the association between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, censuring the mildest displays of support for the Palestinian cause. When the Aberavon MP Stephen Kinnock suggested that the UK should not import products from illegal Israeli settlements, Starmer briefed that he was ‘infuriated’ by the remark, and dispatched Nandy – now shadow foreign secretary – to give him a ‘dressing down’.¹⁸ Starmer pulled out of an event organized by the academic Omar Salha after learning that he supported the boycott of Israeli dates during Ramadan. When it emerged that the junior shadow cabinet member Lloyd Russell-Moyle had once described Zionism as a ‘dangerous nationalist idea’, Starmer demanded a public apology and Russell-Moyle was forced to resign. On the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people – a key event in the Palestinian calendar dating back to 1977 – Starmer pointedly attended an event hosted by the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel.

A group of prominent British Palestinians sent Starmer five separate letters asking him to redress the increasingly ‘hostile environment’ for Palestinians within the party. They received no reply.¹⁹ Instead, Starmer stepped up his campaign by sacking Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet – accusing her of antisemitic conspiracism for retweeting an Independent interview with the actor Maxine Peake, who suggested, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, that US police had been trained in the technique of ‘neck-kneeling’ by their Israeli counterparts.²⁰ The leader went on to hire a former Israeli military intelligence official to work in LOTO and establish friendly relations with Israel’s Labor Party (led by cheerleaders for the occupation). When Israel rained bombs on Gaza in May 2021, Starmer got Nandy to draft a statement that implicitly blamed Palestinian rocket attacks for the violence.²¹ The left-wing group Jewish Voice for Labour noted that suspensions and expulsions had disproportionately targeted Jewish anti-Zionists.

Corbyn’s suspension

But none of these gestures would be sufficient so long as Starmer’s predecessor continued to wield influence over the membership. The real prize would be ousting Corbyn from the party. Starmer’s opportunity arrived on 29 October 2020. On that day, the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission published its highly anticipated report on Labour antisemitism. Rumours had been circulating that Corbyn would be suspended following its release, with Labour sources briefing a select group of journalists to that effect. Yet there appeared to be disagreements among Starmer’s team. While some were pushing to suspend Corbyn immediately once the EHRC delivered its verdict, others cautioned that they should allow him to respond before making their decision. A source close to Angela Rayner told me that the deputy leader was reluctant to eject her former boss. Although she didn’t share Corbyn’s politics, she had become associated with his wing of the party since her election to parliament in 2015, serving in his shadow cabinet and receiving Momentum’s endorsement in the deputy leadership race. A full-on factional war between Corbyn and Starmer was likely to split her support base, with consequences for her future leadership ambitions.

As it happened, nothing in the content of the EHRC report gave Starmer cause to escalate his purge. It retrospectively identified various problems with Labour’s disciplinary process, but responsibility for these faults lay with a number of right-wing former officials – including Jenny Formby’s predecessor as general secretary, Iain McNicol, and the head of disputes, Sam Matthews – whereas Corbyn’s allies had largely fixed them. The EHRC also noted that, under Corbyn, LOTO had ‘interfered’ in a small number of antisemitism complaints cases; but it conceded that the aim of such interference was to speed up processing times and hand down harsher penalties. Since there was nothing in the report itself that indicted Corbyn, the pretext for his suspension would have to be his reaction to its findings. He had been sent a first draft of the EHRC document the previous summer, but Starmer’s office would not allow him to read the final version until its publication date. The week before its release, Corbyn had collaborated with Milne, Schneider, Murray and Murphy on writing a response. They eventually drafted a text which asserted that

antisemitism is absolutely abhorrent, wrong and responsible for some of humanity’s greatest crimes. As Leader of the Labour Party I was always determined to eliminate all forms of racism and root out the cancer of antisemitism. I have campaigned in support of Jewish people and communities my entire life and I will continue to do so … Anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong. Of course there is, as there is throughout society, and sometimes it is voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left. Jewish members of our party and the wider community were right to expect us to deal with it, and I regret that it took longer to deliver that change than it should. One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.²²

Corbyn was set to issue this statement on the morning of 29 October so long as the final version of the report did not substantively depart from the previous one. On the evening of the 28th he received a call from Starmer, who told him that Labour’s official response would not personally mention him or his leadership, but would instead focus on the party’s collective responsibility for dealing with racism. Starmer asked how Corbyn planned to respond, and Corbyn replied that he could not say exactly since he had not read the finished text. He then asked to see an advance version of Starmer’s press statement so that he could make sure his own comments would not conflict with it. Starmer promised Corbyn he would send it over, and rang off.

Later that night, Milne received a call from Rayner, who seemed stressed and agitated. She said they needed to ensure that Corbyn was protected once the report came out, and emphasized that he should be cautious in his response. Milne repeated what Corbyn had said to Starmer, asking her to send them the leader’s official statement so they could amend Corbyn’s accordingly. She said she would tell LOTO communications director Ben Nunn to email it as soon as possible. But by the next morning, neither Corbyn nor Milne had received Starmer’s communiqué – despite Milne prompting Rayner for a second time. At 9:30am Corbyn was sent the pdf of the EHRC document half an hour before it was released to the general public. Schneider and Milne checked it over to see if it was different to the version they had already read and found no changes that would affect Corbyn’s response. They were eager to publish it as soon as possible so that it would feature in the initial media coverage of the EHRC report, and at 10:35am it was posted on social media. Corbyn then filmed a short video clip reiterating his written statement at a community centre in Finsbury Park.

Starmer and his staff read Corbyn’s post as soon as it was published. At 11:00am, Starmer gave a press conference at Labour HQ in which he appeared to respond directly to his predecessor’s remarks. ‘If after all the pain, all the grief, and all the evidence in this report’, he said, ‘there are still those who think there’s no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party, that it’s all exaggerated, or a factional attack, then, frankly, you are part of the problem too. And you should be nowhere near the Labour Party either.’²³ Upon hearing these words, Corbyn’s team began to wonder whether Starmer had deliberately withheld the transcript of his speech, hoping that Corbyn would say something that could be used to justify his foreordained suspension. ‘If Keir had sent us his statement,’ said one of Corbyn’s aides, ‘we would have cut Jeremy’s line about the scale of the problem being “dramatically overstated”.’ Some could not help but conclude that Starmer had refused to share the draft of his speech because he intended to create a marked contrast between his statement and Corbyn’s.

Rayner texted Milne after the press conference and told him that the situation was ‘seriously bad’. Milne replied, ‘Obviously we would have modified if we had heard what Keir was going to say.’ After Starmer left the podium at Labour HQ, he met with other LOTO staffers on the eighth floor of the building and made the order to issue the suspension. Corbyn made to leave the community centre at around 1:00pm only to be told by the Sky News cameraman who had filmed the interview that he had been suspended. He hightailed over to a nearby shop run by his son, where Murphy set up a conference call with McDonnell and Abbott. Staffers who sat in on the call reported that McDonnell encouraged Corbyn to apologize – an appeal that he allegedly reiterated in Socialist Campaign Group meetings over the following weeks, although McDonnell denies ever having given such counsel.

At that point, messages of solidarity began to roll in from the membership. CLPs across the country – Liverpool, London, Bristol, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Bolton, Cardiff – passed motions condemning the suspension. Trade unions threatened to withhold funding from Labour for the upcoming local elections. Statements of support arrived from left-wing leaders in Latin America, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and partisans of the Sanders movement. In response, Starmer and Evans ordered CLPs and Labour MPs not to discuss Corbyn’s suspension at risk of being suspended themselves. All CLP motions supporting Corbyn would be ruled ‘out of order’, and any critical discussion of the EHRC report would lead to disciplinary action. Rayner, having been forced to pick a side in the factional dispute she tried to prevent, fell in line with Starmer, warning that the leadership was ready to suspend ‘thousands and thousands’ of members. Of course, this meant ousting any Jewish members who deviated from the party line. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a prominent Jewish Voice for Labour activist, and Moshé Machover, a left-wing Israeli-born academic, were among those booted out.²⁴ David Evans began to refer to Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit – the body responsible for investigating and suspending members – as ‘AC-12’: a reference to the special police unit in the BBC crime drama Line of Duty. ‘The implication was clear’, a Labour official told me. ‘He saw it as a tool not for upholding the governance of party, but for policing and surveilling the members.’

Negotiations begin

Despite its heavy-handed treatment of dissenters, LOTO knew it was on shaky ground. The EHRC report had explicitly stated that Labour members were entitled to ‘express their opinions on internal Party matters, such as the scale of antisemitism within the Party’²⁵ – so expelling Corbyn for claiming that the scale had been ‘overstated’ would be difficult. In addition, one of the report’s key recommendations was that disciplinary action over alleged antisemitism should be free from ‘political interference’. It asserted that if ‘staff from the Leader of the Opposition’s Office were able to influence decisions on complaints, especially decisions on whether to suspend someone’, this would amount to ‘unlawful indirect discrimination’.²⁶ So by suspending Corbyn and his allies, Starmer had himself violated the injunctions of the EHRC. The leader appeared to realize this shortly afterwards, and switched from claiming that he had made a ‘difficult decision’ on Corbyn’s case, to claiming that he had only been ‘consulted’ on the action – for which David Evans agreed to take responsibility. (From the perspective of the EHRC report, however, this was a meaningless distinction, since being consulted would still constitute ‘unlawful’ interference).²⁷ Despite one shadow cabinet member briefing that the suspension could be Starmer’s ‘Clause IV moment’, its execution was too clumsy to have the intended effect.

That made Starmer keen to resolve the matter quickly. Having taken the symbolic step of banishing Corbyn, he was now mindful of the potential fallout. Morgan McSweeney rang Trickett on the afternoon of the 29th to tell him that LOTO was ready to strike a deal that would see the former leader return to the party. At 4:00pm, a large group of Corbyn’s allies gathered near Finsbury Park, and McDonnell suggested that Trickett and McCluskey negotiate with LOTO. After their discussion, the Unite leader rang up Starmer and asked if he wanted to resolve the issue. Starmer answered in the affirmative. The pair agreed to meet again the following day, along with Trickett, Rayner and McSweeney. McCluskey kicked off the summit by demanding the immediate reversal of the suspension and lambasting Starmer for his hypocrisy. Starmer rejected McCluskey’s appeal, but he agreed to reinstate Corbyn if the two teams could agree on a new statement for him to sign. Trickett told Starmer that this would have to be a ‘clarification’ rather than an apology, and Starmer assented to this prerequisite. Starmer and Corbyn then stepped back from the process – allowing McSweeney, Fletcher, McCluskey and Trickett to draft the revised statement with input from Andrew Murray. By 4:10pm on Saturday the 31st, the quartet had hammered out a wording they could all agree on, which included the following diplomatic sentences: ‘I regret the pain this issue has caused the Jewish community and would wish to do nothing that would exacerbate or prolong it. To be clear, concerns about antisemitism are neither “exaggerated” nor “overstated”. The point I wished to make was that the vast majority of Labour Party members were and remain committed anti-racists deeply opposed to antisemitism.’²⁸

The clarification was approved by Starmer the same day. He agreed to welcome Corbyn’s statement in an upcoming interview on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday the 1st. Yet this opportunity was missed, as Trickett and McCluskey were unable to get Corbyn to sign off on the document before Starmer went on air (the former leader had retreated to the West Country and was unreachable by phone). Once Corbyn had eventually approved the wording, another group call was held on 12 November with Fletcher, Trickett, McSweeney and Milne. Their aim was to choreograph the release of the statement along with Corbyn’s subsequent readmission. It was decided – in this meeting and in subsequent exchanges between Trickett and McSweeney – that the text would be published the following Tuesday, ahead of a National Executive Committee meeting which would rule on Corbyn’s case. To avoid the impression of a partisan stitch-up, they agreed that the NEC meeting would be composed of half Corbynites and half Starmerites, with the casting vote given to the second group. The committee, they determined, would issue Corbyn with a ‘reminder of values’ and take no further action. According to two of those present at the 12 November discussion, McSweeney briefly raised the issue of the Labour whip, suggesting that it would be automatically restored with Corbyn’s membership.

McSweeney and Trickett continued to coordinate over WhatsApp throughout the day of the NEC meeting. At 8:57am McSweeney saw that Corbyn’s statement had not yet been published and sent a text to Trickett saying he was getting worried. ‘Do you want us to pull the meeting?’ he asked. Trickett told him to wait a few minutes, and Corbyn published the text as planned. That afternoon, the committee met and sat for several hours. There was a slight hiccup in the arrangement when two of the panel’s Starmerites insisted on giving Corbyn a ‘reminder of conduct’ – a step up in severity from the sanction that had been agreed. But by early evening the reinstatement was passed, and Corbyn publicly thanked Labour members and trade unions for their support. Starmer had been prepared to draw a line under the affair, but, having grown complacent after months of glowing media coverage, he had not anticipated the level of instant pushback from the Right. The Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies of British Jews forcefully condemned Corbyn’s reinstatement. The former briefed that Labour had ‘expedited this case for hearing by a factionally aligned political committee’; the latter called the decision ‘a retrograde step for the Party in its relations with the Jewish community’.²⁹ Dame Margaret Hodge – the Labour MP for Barking, once lofted by the BNP for arguing that immigrants should be denied access to council housing³⁰ – angrily confronted Starmer, threatening to resign unless Corbyn was kept out of the PLP. A similar threat was reportedly made by a senior frontbencher.

Starmer reneges

The possibility of resignations rattled the leader, who was heard ‘shouting and swearing’ in Nick Brown’s office on the 18th. Starmer told Brown that he had never approved the text of Corbyn’s statement nor signed off on his read-mission to the party. The chief whip reportedly found this hard to swallow, as it would have meant that McSweeney – who was in contact with Starmer almost every hour of the day – had taken the extraordinary step of planning Corbyn’s readmission without the leader’s knowledge. But whether or not he believed Starmer was immaterial. The important thing was that LOTO had begun telling the whips office, and the press, that they would not allow Corbyn to sit as a Labour MP until he had unreservedly apologized. Although McSweeney had assured Milne and Corbyn that the whip would be restored, Starmer’s change of heart forced him to renege on this commitment. LOTO negotiators also told their counterparts that the leader was livid after seeing prominent figures on the Labour Left posting triumphalist social media comments about the NEC ruling. The next day, Starmer officially announced that he had withdrawn the whip from Corbyn, to rapturous applause from Hodge and the Board of Deputies.³¹

Corbyn launched a legal challenge to the decision. He knew this would probably fail, since the courts rarely interfere in internal party disputes, but it was a useful means of publicizing the reams of evidence – text messages, emails, minutes – which proved that Starmer had broken their agreement. On 20 November, Corbyn’s team decided it was better to negotiate with the chief whip than with LOTO. They dispatched Trickett and Ian Lavery to meet with Brown, who liaised with the leader’s office about restarting talks. By this time, McCluskey had given up, believing Starmer to be fundamentally untrustworthy. Starmer instructed Brown to send Corbyn a letter which suggested he could return to the PLP once he had ‘unequivocally’ repented for his comments.³² Corbyn was also informed that his suspension would last at least three months while the party ‘investigated’ the incident. In turn, Trickett and Lavery told Brown that Corbyn would only return to the PLP once all those suspended for solidarity motions had also been reinstated. They stressed the need to settle any outstanding complaints against Corbyn, so that he could not be readmitted and then re-suspended shortly afterwards. LOTO agreed to both these requests and began to gradually reinstate those evicted for pro-Corbyn CLP statements. Milne drafted a second text that seemed to satisfy all parties: an expression of regret from Corbyn, plus an endorsement of the EHRC recommendations. But once again, Starmer approved this wording and then abruptly changed his mind, scuppering their tentative deal. Brown, who ‘did his best to get Jeremy readmitted’ according to one of Corbyn’s negotiators, was sacked as chief whip and replaced by the Blairite Alan Campbell.

Campbell subsequently began negotiating with Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, who took the reins from Trickett and Lavery. While Corbyn’s allies have found it difficult to interpret Starmer’s triple U-turn on the suspension (making the decision, seeking to reverse it, and then twice reversing the reversal), the consensus is that LOTO has simply been unable to make up its mind. On the one hand, Labour’s poll ratings began to slide after Corbyn’s exit, with the party haemorrhaging support among demographics that will be indispensable come election time: millennials, BAME communities and Muslims.³³ On the other, the suspension was part of a broader strategy to win Conservative voters by shedding any association with Corbyn’s class-based politics. Campbell initially told Ward that Corbyn could be readmitted by simply issuing an apology, without specifying what he was apologizing for. When Corbyn agreed, Campbell retracted the offer and told him that Starmer had yet again changed his mind.

While Corbyn’s status remains in limbo, his successor has failed to take action on a deluge of other discrimination cases. Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the EHRC, who called Muslims a ‘nation within a nation’ and remarked that allowing a Muslim family to foster a non-Muslim child would be ‘akin to child abuse’, has been allowed to stay in the party. Starmer has accepted large donations from the property developer David Abrahams, whose Twitter page was filled with (now deleted) comments about ‘self-hating Jews’ and tirades against the ‘mixed loyalties’ of British Muslims. Former Labour HQ officials who allegedly made racist remarks about Diane Abbott were readmitted after a fleeting suspension. Starmer’s rescindment of support for Kashmiri self-determination has seen more than a hundred mosques and Islamic centres threaten to boycott Labour. Starmer has repeatedly been called upon to address the ‘vile Islamophobia’ in his party – but so far he has refused.³⁴ The Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty drew the unavoidable conclusion shortly after the Batley byelection: that Labour under Starmer has acquired ‘a whole new race problem’.³⁵

Running aground

At the launch of Labour’s campaign for the 6 May 2021 local elections, soundbites included the need for ‘a more secure economy that works for everyone ‘, ‘a more prosperous and outward looking country’, ‘safer communities’ and so on. Largely contentless expressions that tried to channel the moral impulses of the public, they made little headway with voters. Labour lost control of eight councils on 29 per cent of the popular vote, seven points behind the Conservatives. A supplementary infusion of flag-waving for St George failed to avert a wounding defeat in the Hartlepool byelection, held the same day.

Even former allies had by now begun to accuse Starmer of ‘not standing for anything’, having ‘no direction’, and lacking a coherent ‘vision’ or ‘ambition’.³⁶ Kibasi, promised the job of chief of staff and then passed over, wrote that Starmer ‘has let focus groups define his strategy, which is to go easy on the government, rather than developing a clear message of his own’. Starmer’s emphasis on ‘listening to voters’ was consonant with his mass legal consultations at the CPS, in that both involved a show of delegating decisions to the public.³⁷ But Kibasi judged it ‘profoundly naïve’– ‘Letting randomly selected members of the public set the political tone is followership, not leadership.’³⁸ By spring 2021 this trend had reached ridiculous proportions. Labour staffers were exasperated when the leadership could not decide on a lectern for the upcoming party conference without first putting several possible designs through focus groups.

John McDonnell responded to the May election results with a complaint that candidates had been sent into battle ‘almost naked without a policy programme’. The Blairite old guard on the other hand blamed Corbyn and called for an accelerated shift back to the extreme centre. Weakened at the polls, Starmer now became increasingly reliant on the latter group. Mandelson was recruited as an informal adviser and David Blunkett hired to sit on Labour’s new ‘council of skills’. A reshuffle in the leadership team saw the New Labour aide Sam White appointed chief of staff, one-time Blair spokesperson Matthew Doyle enlisted as communications director, and Deborah Mattinson – a pollster who previously worked for Blair and Brown – elevated to LOTO’s strategy director.³⁹ The following December saw the return of yet more relics from the Blair years, promoting Yvette Cooper to the role of shadow home secretary and demoting Ed Miliband for being insufficiently pro-business. While Starmer’s ‘values-led’ politics originally conceived of itself as an attempt to save Labour from both the disenchantment wrought by Blairism and the ideological aberrance of Corbynism, these personnel changes marked the complete repudiation of its claim to be a novel or progressive phenomenon. The leader is now obliged to appease such factional interests, which among other things spells Corbyn’s ultimate expulsion from the PLP, even if it means damaging Labour’s popularity. Blair himself has declared that ‘the Labour Party needs complete deconstruction and reconstruction. Nothing less will do.’ Public ownership of industry, free university tuition, and progressive taxation must be repudiated as a matter of urgency.⁴⁰ Only a full-scale New Labour revival would be sufficient to reverse the Left’s advances.

Market economics

Starmer’s views on economic policy have proven more pliable than his stance on, say, issues of law and order. In his first major speech on the economy he declared that the post-pandemic period was no time to reduce government spending.⁴¹ The man who pledged to jail social welfare ‘cheats’ in 2013 and backed the Tory Welfare Bill in 2015 now supported easing benefit sanctions and scrapping Universal Credit for a more equitable system.⁴² The ‘strong statist tradition’ with which he identifies has historically been compatible with robust welfare measures, especially at times of national crisis. Yet, while Starmer may have no strong aversion to a social safety net, three factors have ensured that even modest social democratic proposals remain off the table: his eagerness to break with his predecessor’s legacy, his under-confidence on fiscal issues, and his subsequent reliance on New Labourite mentors. (In the summer of 2021 Starmer asked Lord Falconer – a senior minister in the Blair cabinet – to give him introductory seminars on economics, setting out the basic contours of Labour’s approach.) On such questions, it would be a mistake to think that the Starmer project has been limited to trite appeals to voters’ perceived values. Even before the Hartlepool defeat, Starmer’s team had begun to craft a policy platform beneath the public-relations platitudes, one separated by clear blue water from the Corbynist ten pledges on which he ran for party leader.

Starmer’s first appointment to shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, pledged the party to fiscal restraint. As she castigated Sunak’s ‘cavalier’ approach to spending, the leader promised the Financial Times that he would hone an economic message focused on reprioritizing public funds rather than making substantial additional commitments.⁴³ Starmer and Dodds dropped their pledge for a wealth tax on the top 5 per cent of earners, and at the autumn 2020 Budget switched from supporting corporation tax rises to opposing them (allowing Sunak to outflank Labour from the Left).⁴⁴ Their policy announcements mirrored existing Tory measures: a coronavirus ‘recovery bond’ (similar to the ‘green savings bond’ devised by Sunak), and loans for new businesses (already widely available through the Start Up Loans Company).⁴⁵

Dodds’s successor, Rachel Reeves, a former HBOS banker, used her conference speech in September 2021 to attack the Conservatives for missing deficit targets and promised strict fiscal rules to balance revenue expenditure and reduce national debt in order to reassure the markets. The Sunday Times enthused that her slogans ‘could have been mouthed by New Labour spin doctors’. Her only apparent point of departure from the Blair–Brown era was a ‘Buy British’ public-sector procurement plan with faint echoes of McDonnell’s 2018 ‘Build it in Britain’ campaign.⁴⁶ Yet whereas the McDonnell plan would have imposed a legal obligation to prioritize British manufacturers, levy financial-transaction taxes on multinationals and mount large-scale public works to redress the housing crisis, Reeves’s Buy British programme merely stated that public bodies will be ‘asked’ to alter their tendering decisions. The penalty for refusing would be the publication of an obscure accounting record revealing how much they have bought domestically versus overseas. Unlike McDonnell, Reeves saw no conflict between parasitic and productive business, and thus no need for sanctions on financial speculation; nor would she seek to remove the straitjacket of World Trade Organization rules. Behind these contrasts lay a divergence of objective. For Corbyn and McDonnell, the aim was to redistribute wealth, centre the state’s role in shaping market activity, and use this new balance of power to improve workers’ pay and conditions. For Starmer and Reeves, the goal was contrarily to ‘support our businesses’.⁴⁷ Senior shadow cabinet members have now agreed to meet once every two weeks with the UK’s largest business organizations, giving them a prominent role in Labour policy making.⁴⁸

Starmer’s shifts on climate-change policy followed a similar pattern. His leadership campaign vowed to ‘put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do’; yet one year later environmentalists were observing that Starmer had become ‘too busy with authoritarian-nationalist posturing and a granular bureaucratic crackdown on the left to pay any attention to planetary emergency’.⁴⁹ The Corbyn-era GND motion passed by the 2019 party conference had been premised on ‘a state-led programme of investment and regulation, based on public ownership and democratic control, for the decarbonization and transformation of our economy’. Developed in close collaboration with trade unions, it sought to reduce emissions by ‘removing key areas of social and economic reproduction from the system of production for profit’, in the words of policymaker Mary Robertson. As well as nationalizing the existing rail, mail, water and energy infrastructure, the state would undertake ‘a major expansion of state planning and ownership in industry, thereby subordinating the operation of the market to social objectives’.⁵⁰ The proposed spending on this overhaul was enormous, and McDonnell warned that businesses which failed to meet the government’s environmental criteria would be delisted from the London Stock Exchange.⁵¹

Starmer’s ‘Green Economic Recovery’ plan, unveiled in November 2020, marked a retreat on all these fronts. In formulating climate policy, he sidelined trade unions in favour of liberal NGOs.⁵² More than 70 per cent of submissions to his consultation exercise called on him to endorse the GND – but these appeals from members and affiliated unions were ignored (marking the apparent limit of Starmer’s appetite for ‘public consultation’).⁵³ When a motion to support the GND was passed by Labour conference in September 2021 despite the leadership’s attempt to block it, Starmer made immediately clear that the policy would not make its way into the manifesto. Despite his campaign pledges, Starmer is no longer committed to nationalizing key industries.⁵⁴ Instead of a state-led transition, he envisages a decarbonization drive in which the ‘vast majority’ of funding would come from the private sector, with the state ‘providing a stable regulatory context to incentivise low carbon investment’.⁵⁵ He does not advocate any additional public spending, but instead proposes an altered timeline for dispensing the £30 billion that the Conservatives have already set aside for green initiatives. That would be enough to create 400,000 low-carbon jobs and insulate 7 million homes – figures that pale in comparison to the GND targets.⁵⁶ Corbyn’s 2030 deadline has been pushed back to 2050, and any trace of opposition to the polluter lobby has been eradicated.⁵⁷

In its place, Newest Labour has touted the potential of ‘green finance’. A Starmer government would ‘consolidate the UK’s position as the green finance capital of the world by … encouraging private finance to align its investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement’ and scaling up the use of carbon capture and storage.⁵⁸ This is music to the ears of the fossil fuel industry, which has avoided regulation by throwing its weight behind ‘market-based’ climate fixes. Companies such as Shell, BP and ExxonMobil have bankrolled carbon storage because it allows them to maintain their current emission levels in the hope that the CO₂ might someday be ‘captured’ by unproven technology.⁵⁹ Angus Satow, co-founder of the campaign group Labour for a GND, described the Green Economic Recovery as ‘a “Green New Deal” shorn of class conflict, with no plans to rapidly wind down fossil fuels (and mass aviation) while empowering workers in a just transition’. ‘This isn’t climate leadership,’ he warned, ‘it’s a recipe for climate catastrophe.’⁶⁰

Confronting China

In foreign policy, Starmer has jettisoned another core tenet of Corbynism: its attempt to develop an international programme grounded in the principles of justice and solidarity, rather than subservience to the United States. As we saw in chapter one, Starmer had become a convinced Atlanticist and opponent of the Left during his time as DPP. This aspect of his political formation was as much a factor in his war on Labour’s socialists as his Ainsleyite electoral strategy. Since entering LOTO, he has pushed a militarist-chauvinist agenda – pro-police, pro-army, anti-protester – which is not merely a sop to Red Wall conservatives, but a consistent feature of his politics, born out of longstanding service to Britain’s deep state.

Starmer brought Labour into line with the New Cold War against the West’s strategic rivals, applauding the UK’s trilateral military partnership with the US and Australia. The party demanded tougher action against China, calling for ‘an end to the naivety of the golden era’, a ban on Chinese Communist Party officials entering Britain, the marginalization of China at the UN, improved coordination with the US, and an escalated sanctions regime.⁶¹ Stephen Kinnock, his wings clipped after his momentary deviation on Palestine, reinforced this position in his capacity as foreign policy spokesman on China. ‘Managing the rise of China is the number one geopolitical challenge the world is facing’, he declared in May 2020, lamenting that ‘there is very little evidence of any kind of success in terms of exerting or projecting our influence’ on the CCP.⁶² Nandy and Kinnock established close ties with the Tories’ foremost China hawk, the former Territorial Army officer Tom Tugendhat, who quipped that ‘Stephen Kinnock and I could give each other’s speeches on this subject’. Tugendhat has argued that Chinese students at British universities should be ‘threatened with removal’, that the UK should form a new international trading bloc to isolate China, and that the West must ‘neutralise the Belt and Road Initiative’.⁶³ His ‘China Research Group’, established to promote such policies, was once seen as an association of hard-right Tory jingoists; but under Starmer, Labour MPs have been encouraged to join it.⁶⁴

As Kinnock’s rhetoric about ‘the rise of China’ indicates, the motive for Labour’s Sino-hostility is inter-state competition: the imperative to fall in line behind Washington’s bipartisan drive to buttress a US-dominated global order in which Britain plays a head-servant’s role. Starmer reasserted Labour’s ‘unshakeable’ commitment to NATO, telling the Fabian Society in his first foreign policy speech that ‘I’m pro-American … America is our most important security ally … I believe that Britain’s national interest lies in once again being the bridge between the US and the rest of Europe.’⁶⁵ He conveyed the same sentiment to Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, during a friendly get-together in July 2020.⁶⁶ Alignment with Washington has occasionally placed Starmer to the left of Johnson – for instance, when he pressured the PM to follow the Americans’ lead and cease arms sales to the Saudis.⁶⁷ But by and large, Starmer has attempted to outdo Johnson on matters of ‘national security’. The same month Starmer met Pompeo, he made an unusually forceful attack on Johnson for failing to aggressively confront Russia, declaring that ‘the government has badly underestimated the Russian threat and the response it required’.⁶⁸ He demanded harsher sanctions, akin to those imposed by the US, and affirmed his support for new legislation to strengthen Britain’s domestic security services. When that legislation was drafted, it gave the government expanded powers to silence critical journalists and academics by recasting them as enemy spies.⁶⁹ In January 2022, as Russia stationed troops at the Ukrainian border in a bid to halt NATO’s eastward expansion, Starmer used a Telegraph op-ed to applaud the Tories’ tough line on the ‘Russian threat’, and encouraged the government to cut off Russian access to the global financial system.

Supporting the troops

The revival of Blair-era Atlanticism has also involved a new approach to the military. Starmer relaunched the party’s ‘Friends of the Armed Forces’ scheme and broadcast its ‘non-negotiable’ support for nuclear weapons.⁷⁰ He lobbied to keep troop numbers high and backed the cabinet’s decision to spend an additional £16.5 billion on defence – the largest budget increase since Thatcher.⁷¹ ‘We welcome this additional funding for our defence and security forces’, he told the Commons, praising the Conservatives for ending ‘a decade of underinvestment’.⁷² For Starmer, these cash reserves should be used to maintain Britain’s military presence abroad. The party’s shadow minister for the Middle East, Wayne David, is an ardent supporter of intervention in Iraq and Syria. When the government commenced its draw-down of soldiers from Afghanistan, Rayner was deployed to reproach Johnson, telling him ‘we simply cannot wash our hands and walk away’. Starmer demanded an emergency meeting of NATO to decide the country’s fate and signalled he would support renewed military action against the Taliban.⁷³

The shadow defence secretary, John Healey, summed up the party’s foreign policy direction in a speech to the RUSI defence think tank in early 2021, where he reassured the security establishment that Labour had come to its senses. The leadership would no longer seek to obstruct Britain’s EU exit, but would instead strive to maintain centrality in NATO by spearheading ‘greater defence cooperation’ with the EU. A Labour government, said Healey, would ‘compete hard to maintain parity with potential adversaries’ and ‘contribute to NATO’s armoury’ in the areas of ‘AI, space, cyber, robotics and greyzone deterrence’. It would invest in the homegrown arms industry and ‘see a higher bar set for decisions to procure Britain’s defence equipment from other countries’. In office, Starmer would commit to building new nuclear submarines, as well as maintaining ‘continuous at-sea deterrence’ and purchasing ‘all future upgrades to this capability that may be necessary’. The shadow minister pointed out that while the Tories’ £16.5 billion upgrade was sufficient to cover capital funding for the armed forces – new weapons and equipment – it was not enough to provide adequate day-to-day expenditure. Channelling the correct amount to ‘recruitment, training, pay and families’ required a magnanimity that could only come from Labour.⁷⁴

Starmer’s model army would not only be well staffed and well heeled – it would also be given impunity on its excursions. Back in 2016, Starmer voted against opening investigations into the Iraq War.⁷⁵ He upheld this principle four years later when the government introduced the Overseas Operations Bill: a piece of legislation that gives soldiers ‘statutory presumption against prosecution’ for crimes committed on foreign missions. Amnesty International warned that the reforms would give the armed forces ‘a free pass over alleged war crimes’, while David Davis described them as a plan to ‘decriminalize torture by British personnel’.⁷⁶ Starmer whipped the PLP to abstain on the bill’s first and second readings. Three Labour MPs with junior roles on the frontbench voted against it and were sacked.⁷⁷ In the run-up to the vote, Starmer met with sceptical members of the PLP and told them that his stance on the bill was not a cynical ploy to court Conservative voters, but a reflection of his deepest political commitments.

However, when the measures were put before parliament for a third time, Starmer changed course and instructed MPs to oppose them. His reason for doing so was not to prevent state-sponsored murder; rather, as Healey explained, it was because the bill did not go far enough to shield troops from ‘vexatious litigation’. Healey argued that ‘the government should give military judges oversight of investigations, with powers to set time limits and block reinvestigations’, and offered to ‘work with the government on the changes needed to make this legislation fit for purpose’.⁷⁸ The following month, Johnson supplemented the Overseas Operations Bill with the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act: a provision to grant immunity to undercover British agents, who would be allowed to kill, rape and torture without the risk of legal sanction. Starmer whipped his MPs to abstain – this time on all three readings – and spent the days beforehand lobbying the PLP to prevent a major rebellion against the proposals. Seven frontbenchers resigned in opposition, and eight more were primed to follow until Starmer talked them down.⁷⁹

Fighting crime

While scrapping accountability for British security services, Starmer promised to get tough on petty crime at home. The former prosecutor has if anything placed Labour to the right of the Conservatives on law and order. The Blair government famously put 3,023 new offences on the statute book – one for almost every day it was in power.⁸⁰ Starmer has reverted to this repressive stance, often recycling New Labour terminology and talking points. ‘I have spent a good deal of my professional life prosecuting criminals’, he declared. ‘We need to get serious about antisocial behaviour.’⁸¹ Just as Blair instigated a notorious ASBO campaign that saw more than a thousand children sent to jail (often for non-criminal activity), Starmer pledged to tackle ‘crimes perceived as “low-level”’. He called on the government to create a £285 million enforcement fund to increase police numbers and state surveillance in ‘antisocial behaviour hot-spots’.⁸² His leadership established strong ties with the Police Federation,⁸³ promising to ‘get police out from behind desks and back on our streets’ while significantly hiking their pay.⁸⁴ When Sarah Everard was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer in March 2021, Starmer declared that the solution was ‘more police officers on the beat’.⁸⁵

The Labour leader scolded the Tories for falling conviction rates and demanded tougher sentences for various offences, from assaulting a police officer to stealing a pet.⁸⁶ He incorrectly claimed that crime was on the rise, inviting a rebuke from the UK Statistics Authority, which accused him of applying ‘pressure for policy changes not supported by the data’.⁸⁷ After a monument to the slave trader Edward Colston was torn down by anti-racist demonstrators in Bristol, Starmer condemned the protest as ‘completely wrong’ and supported Priti Patel’s proposal to hand down ten-year prison sentences to anyone who vandalized a statue.⁸⁸ Two weeks later, he followed Patel in denouncing Black Lives Matter, excoriating its demand to cut police funding and describing it as a fleeting ‘moment’ (a choice of words for which he later apologized).⁸⁹

Starmer did not bat an eyelid at Patel’s plan to use the Royal Navy to push back migrant crossings in the Channel. Rather than defending the legal right to claim asylum, he criticized the home secretary for her ‘incompetence’ in not deterring refugees more effectively. When the campaign group Open Labour asked him to condemn the government’s increasingly hard border policies, he refused.⁹⁰ The leader took a similarly hands-off approach to Patel’s deportation of foreign nationals, which continued apace despite the Windrush scandal. In December 2020, left-wing MPs petitioned Starmer to stand up for Osime Brown, a severely autistic and developmentally disabled twenty-two-year-old who was falsely accused of stealing a mobile phone and set to be deported to Jamaica, where he had not lived since he was four years old.⁹¹ Again, Starmer demurred. In a radio interview on LBC, he assured listeners that he fully supported the deportation of ‘criminals’ and boasted that he had upheld this principle during his time as DPP.⁹²

Starmer initially pledged to back Patel’s plan to increase police powers and ban BLM-style protest with new crime legislation.⁹³ However, upon reading the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Bill, brought to parliament in March 2021, LOTO realized the frightening extent of its reach. The proposals gave police the ability to place sweeping restrictions on protests – imposing a start and end time, setting strict noise limits and applying fines of £2,500 to those who ignore their directions. They made it a criminal offence to cause a ‘public nuisance’, and gave officers the ability to break up any demonstration they deemed an ‘annoyance’. Mutatis mutandis, the traveller community would be criminalized by outlawing trespass and overturning the right to roam. ‘This will be the biggest widening of police powers to impose restrictions on public protest that we’ve seen in our lifetimes,’ said Chris Daw QC. ‘The bill hands over the power of deciding whether a protest is justified or should be allowed – decisions we as citizens have had for generations – directly to the Home Secretary. That’s an extremely chilling development.’⁹⁴

Faced with this prospect, Starmer pivoted from active support for the PCSC Bill to abstention. He told shadow cabinet members that Labour would undermine its law-and-order image by opposing the bill outright; but he conceded that it was ‘poorly thought-out’ and required redrafting. The party would have stuck with this compromise position if not for the Sarah Everard vigil on 13 March, where hundreds turned out to mourn on Clapham Common in London and faced a violent backlash from Met officers, who were filmed slamming women to the ground and making indiscriminate arrests.⁹⁵ After the event, and the wave of protests that followed, the shadow justice secretary, David Lammy, withdrew his support for the abstention policy. To press ahead with it, Starmer would have had to sack the most high-profile member of his frontbench – and that he was unwilling to do. At the last minute he decided to whip against the bill; although he framed this primarily as a rejection of its ‘inadequate sentencing’ for rape and stalking, rather than a defence of civil liberties.⁹⁶ Large demonstrations against the PCSC Bill began in Bristol and continued after the police ordered the crowds to disband. Starmer, true to his convictions, described the protesters’ show of defiance as ‘inexcusable’ and ‘completely unacceptable’.⁹⁷

Prospects

One of the Starmer project’s potentially fatal flaws was to suppose that McSweeney’s idealist pitch to the membership could be replicated on a larger scale with Ainsley’s moral appeal to the electorate. What this strategy did not consider was that there may be a qualitative distinction between a Labour leadership ballot and a popular poll. After all, it is easier to identify a stable set of values among Labour members than among the general public. The former’s outlook has been influenced by the institution and its traditions: trade unionism, welfarism, Christian socialism. There are significant differences between the two poles of the party – but, as McSweeney observed, these are not always obvious or important to the 40 per cent in the middle. Such rifts were almost invisible during the 2020 leadership election, as the contenders presented broadly similar programmes and refused to openly antagonize one another. With Lavery prevented from running, there was no candidate willing to divide the voters on contentious questions such as privatization or overseas intervention. Members were not called upon to pick sides; their spontaneous values were not challenged or remoulded through a process of debate. Starmer’s team could simply ascertain what they believed in and repeat it back to them.

In Britain at large, however, value systems are more heterogeneous, changeable, provisional – harder to measure in focus groups. Surveys yield notoriously unreliable data about public sentiments, and people’s answers change dramatically depending on how the question is phrased or the range of options they are given.⁹⁸ Using such calculations to determine society’s ‘core values’ – namely those that attract the most voters – is bound to produce a politics of bromides and generalities: too inert to formulate attractive policy proposals, too cautious to be compelling.

Furthermore, while McSweeney’s approach was tailored to the relatively consensual 2020 Labour leadership election, national politics has seen a contrasting increase in antagonism. Johnson’s Tories won the 2019 election by breaking with the weak-willed compromises of his predecessor, offering a spirited, optimistic, forward-looking Conservatism that promised to ‘level-up’ the country and smash those who stood in its way: Remainers, Westminster, migrants, the ‘woke establishment’. With Johnsonism grounding its appeal in these polarities, the Conservatives actively shaped the nation’s values instead of passively reflecting them. They constructed a series of dichotomies (people versus parliament, Britons versus foreigners) and positioned themselves on the most electorally expedient side. Culture wars were enflamed – or created ex nihilo – in order to expand their base. Starmer responded to this newly combative political atmosphere by continuing to do what he did as shadow Brexit secretary: move Labour away from antagonistic left-populism towards what he would regard as common-sense centrism. Rather than replacing the Tories’ false dichotomies with class-based ones, Starmer has offered a series of bland propositions designed to appeal to the apolitical.

This is not an unqualified return to Blairism, inasmuch as Blair and Brown combined their acceptance of Thatcherite free markets with a strong emphasis on the cultural divisions between the two parties: modern/outdated, permissive/intolerant, Europeanist/Eurosceptic – using these contrasts to attack the Tories at every turn. ‘Starmerism’ contains no such antinomies, except that between Left and Right within the Labour Party. In its relationship to the government, it is outwardly more reminiscent of the Miliband era, when the Conservatives would set the ideological tempo and Labour would promise to administer the state more humanely or efficiently within that framework. But this comparison also has its limits. Miliband’s offer was essentially a prophylactic one: to soften the impact of austerity and curb the excesses of the market. It was responding to an overtly punitive Cameron– Osborne agenda that was never intended to inspire hope.

By contrast, Johnson’s appetite for public investment – ‘fund the NHS’, ‘level up’, ‘build back better’ – made it difficult for Starmer to offer a paternalist or redistributive variant of Tory policy, for the Tories had outwardly embraced those nostrums.⁹⁹ Nor could Starmer take the moral high-road and refuse to pick fights with his opponent, for fighting was intrinsic to the Johnson model. While Starmer built a

‘values-led’ politics based on non-confrontation towards the Conservatives, Johnson gained popularity by moving in the contrary direction – sparking conflict whether Labour liked it or not. This explains why so much of Labour’s messaging focused on presenting Johnsonianism as the ‘same old Tories’: ‘all we can expect from this government is more of the same’; ‘they try to pretend this is a different Conservative Party. You could have fooled me’, and so on – disavowals that expressed Starmer’s fear that Milibandian tactics had been blunted in the post-Cameron era.¹⁰⁰

What is the onward trajectory of the Starmer project? At present, Blair’s inheritors are keen to stamp out Big State shibboleths in all sections of the party.¹⁰¹ If they keep Labour on its current pathway, it will enter into a de facto alliance with the ‘fiscally responsible’ faction of the Tories. The Blairites may have regained the party bureaucracy, but they remain starved of relevant ideas, as indicated by Starmer’s long-winded pamphlet The Road Ahead, published by the Fabian Society ahead of his first in-person party conference. The essay replaces his Ten Pledges with Ten Principles, each more vapid than the last: ‘If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be rewarded fairly’; ‘The economy should work for citizens and communities’; ‘People and businesses are expected to contribute to society, as well as receive.’¹⁰² Gavin Barwell remarked that Starmer’s stated beliefs were so bland that ‘they don’t tell us anything useful about what he would do if he became prime minister’. The leader’s soundbites and management-speak are throwbacks to the political style of the 2000s. But the New Labour programme of privatizing or marketizing those parts of the public sector still standing after Thatcher has run its course. Though Starmer regards himself as a modernizer, he lacks any forward-looking vision. Unlike Blair, his function is purely restorationist: to unravel Corbyn’s legacy and reestablish the Right’s monopoly on power. Even after the political windfall of partygate in January 2022, polling showed that the public had little sense of Starmer’s views on any major issue – from the economy to coronavirus to foreign policy.¹⁰³

Starmer is not a politician like Blair, or Benn, or Corbyn, who by the force of their ideological convictions or communicative ability can effect a meaningful change in Britain’s national discourse – which compromises his ability to rebut any populist offer from the Tory Party. At the same time, however, the partygate episode showed that Starmer stands to benefit from the iron constraints of Westminster’s two-party system. For voters frustrated by Tory missteps, Labour is the only viable alternative. As the Conservatives’ popularity began to slide due to Johnson’s ill-discipline, the Statesman reported that if Labour maintained its tentative polling lead, a hung parliament was likely. It qualified that ‘Labour’s gains are not due to new support, but, simply, due to less support for other parties’ – swathes of Leave voters who voted Tory in 2019 but have since become undecided. Because ‘it is far easier for a governing party to rally undecided voters back to its banner than it is to win over those who have defected to another party’, Labour’s tactic of ‘gaining by default’ may reach its limit once campaigning begins in earnest.¹⁰⁴ Nonetheless, it is possible that Conservative crises have undermined the government’s ability to reclaim those vacillating sections of the electorate. The natural strength of the incumbent party is at odds with the complacency engendered by a long spell in office, and a consequent tendency towards self-sabotage. Whichever force wins out will, it seems, be the deciding factor in Starmer’s fortunes. Since there is no substantive policy gap between Labour and the Tories, the first can benefit from presenting itself as a more competent version of the second, when the circumstances are propitious. But because Starmer’s Labour lacks any popular programme, it doesn’t have much ballast against the vagaries of UK politics.

Regardless of whether Labour succeeds at the next election, the overhaul that Starmer instigated in April 2020 looks set to outlast his leadership. Based on the above analysis, it is possible to list the fundamental features of this project: 1) a ‘values-led’, non-antagonistic electoral strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist– authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers. These pillars of Starmerism have brought together previously distinct factions of the Labour Right, from social conservatives to liberal globalists. Those in line to succeed Starmer – Burnham, Rayner, Nandy, Streeting – have all indicated that they will adopt the same approach, albeit with more passion and less self-apology. Labour’s dominant faction believes it can win power at some point in the next decade without confronting the rentier economy, hostile environment or climate emergency. They may be right, thanks to the particularities of Britain’s electoral system. But who could claim this as a victory?

Afterword

Reflecting on the fortunes of the British Left in October 2021, the cultural theorist Mike Wayne proposed a thought experiment. What would have happened if, after Starmer initiated his counterrevolution, Corbyn had leveraged his political capital to lead a small exodus from Labour, establishing a rival grouping inside Westminster which could have overcome the impediments to a new party imposed by first-past-the-post? This socialist bloc, Wayne wrote, ‘would be in a position to change the terms of the debate, shift the parameters of political conversations, just as the Corbyn leadership managed to do in a number of areas, in their best moments. In short, it would be in a position to engage in the battle for hegemony, for moral and political leadership, something which most of the Labour Party for most of its history, has been singularly unwilling to understand or contemplate.’¹

The vast improbability of this scenario helps to prove Wayne’s basic point: that socialists inside and outside parliament have been afflicted by a striking lack of political imagination since Corbyn’s defeat. There is no guarantee that this hypothetical formation would have succeeded at the ballot box; but it would certainly have drawn significant media attention, attracted trade union funding, kept the policies of 2015–19 alive, shown up the collusion of the two main parties, and provided a space in which activists from across the UK – no longer concerned with the immediate task of winning an electoral majority – could coordinate grassroots resistance to the Johnson–Starmer roadshow. New initiatives and coalitions would have emerged from this endeavour whose potential could not be predicted.

But Wayne’s counterfactual remained just that. In reality, the call from every Socialist Campaign Group MP, and almost every left-wing media personality, has been to ‘stay and fight’. The consensus among these figureheads is that the Labour Left must stand its ground and lay the foundations for another leadership challenge, holding out for Corbynism 2.0. This argument is typically directed at the rank and file, who are encouraged to continue paying their monthly dues, despite their antipathy towards Starmer, in order to participate in internal elections. Yet behind this focus on the actions of individual members lies a broader theory of change, which holds that a Labour Party under left-wing leadership is imminently capable of enacting social democratic reform in Britain. Since the reasons for Corbyn’s defeat were contingent rather than structural, so the theory goes, it would be reckless to dismiss the possibility that a political outsider could once again be propelled to the top of Labour and then onward to Downing Street: a faster route than those which run through small or currently non-existent parties.

As comforting as this narrative might be, there are obvious grounds for scepticism. The likelihood of a left challenger making it onto the ballot in the medium-term is minimal. Starmer and his enforcers in Labour HQ have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence: introducing opaque online voting systems, summarily removing their adversaries from key positions, and barring socialists from standing in local and regional elections. With elections to the NEC and leadership now rigged in favour of the Right, further antidemocratic measures will be brought to future Labour conferences, and may prove irreversible if passed. Having accidentally opened up the space for Corbyn’s candidacy by introducing one-member, one-vote in 2014 (in a failed attempt to weaken the power of the unions), the Labour bureaucracy is now on guard against any repetition of this error; which means that the opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party – strong enough to launch a successful leadership campaign – are negligible.²

Even if such a campaign managed to skirt the obvious barriers, most parliamentary socialists have no appetite for ‘fighting’. McDonnell offered to work with Starmer to block a member-led initiative to unseat David Evans; Abbott asserted that ‘I wouldn’t do to Keir what the Right of the party did to Jeremy’.³ This cadre has responded to every factional assault with a renewed appeal for ‘party unity’, rather than mounting so much as a rhetorical counter-attack. A future left candidate could not rely on the Socialist Campaign Group to form a unified front against the rest of Labour’s parliamentary cohort. Despite the lessons of the Corbyn period, they would once again be pressured to make damaging compromises and concessions. Their only allies would be the members with a greater sense of solidarity – Trickett, Lavery, Burgon, Zarah Sultana, Apsana Begum – yet such MPs are thin on the ground, and many of them represent marginal constituencies which could be lost in the next election, when the PLP will inevitably move further to the Right.

Moreover, there is a credible case that the conjunctural factors behind Corbynism were specific to 2015. Corbyn’s support came from disparate sections of the extra-parliamentary Left – anti-imperialists, environmentalists, alter-globo activists, veterans of the student movement, anti-cuts campaigners, Trotskyists and Communists – who united in opposition to austerity. In isolation, none of these actors was politically effective or socially embedded; but together they were numerous enough to vanquish Burnham and Smith. This gave rise to a radical leadership without a robust movement, focused on winning executive power not through mass mobilization or worker militancy, but through a policy programme that aimed to generate sufficient electoral backing among disenfranchised voters. The hope of Corbynism was always a populist shortcut to Downing Street: an attempt to seize the state before developing class consciousness or self-organized communities. This experiment could have succeeded if Corbyn had steadfastly resisted the People’s Vote campaign; but he did not. Now, in 2022, its conditions of possibility have been eclipsed by transformations in the wider political landscape. Austerity is no longer a common enemy, Conservatism has expanded its popular constituency, the Left is weaker and more atomized, and Labour has once again become a right-wing fortress. In this context, is it realistic to believe that another populist endeavour – which bypasses the slow and strenuous battle for hegemony – could achieve its aims? Hasn’t the brief window in which socialists could take this shortcut since been closed?

If so, then plans to reboot Corbynism without Corbyn or rally behind an ostensive ‘unity candidate’ are premature. A left electoral strategy in the absence of a broader movement will come up against immovable obstacles, causing activists to disengage or capitulate. The priority must therefore be to grow this movement through every available channel – most if not all of which exist outside the Labour Party. The Left in this country takes multiple forms: marginal, protean, internally divided, yet theoretically capable of contributing to a vibrant oppositional culture. A number of recent developments have held out the possibility of rejuvenating Britain’s ailing trade unions, whose membership is steadily increasing after decades of decline. One is the election of Sharon Graham as Unite’s general secretary, running on the pledge to divert resources away from Labour into work-place organizing. Another is the rise of micro-unions such as the International Workers of Great Britain and United Voices of the World, which have led the fightback in the gig economy, pitting collective action against exploitative platform companies. Community unions like Acorn, their ranks augmented since the 2019 election, have demonstrated the effects of working-class solidarity in urban centres – stopping evictions, improving living conditions, and terrifying landlords and letting agents into accepting the demands of tenants. Similar local efforts have been assisted by Momentum, which has contemplated an alliance with the left-led trade unions that would forge a dynamic link between the labour movement and the residues of Corbynism.⁴

Political campaigning is another possible avenue, with groups springing up across the country to combat police violence, obstruct fossil fuel extraction, protect asylum seekers and advocate for public ownership. Some of these activities are coordinated by militant organizations such as Reclaim the Power and Sisters Uncut, while others are led by NGO-style institutions: Peace and Justice Project, We Own It, War on Want. Although anti-war activism has been less visible since the Blair years, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign remains a vital outpost – targeting private companies who profit from the West Bank occupation, promoting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and drawing hundreds of thousands to the streets in opposition to Israeli airstrikes – while Stop the War Coalition, which called mass demonstrations against the War on Terror in the 2000s, continues to organize important solidarity actions. Impressive turnouts have likewise been a feature of new social movements – Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter – whose structures and objectives are more diffuse, attracting high levels of participation and attention, though without a plan to translate these into social change. Less cohesive still are horizontalist collectives – cooperative housing groups, mutual aid associations and migrants’ support networks – which usually pass below the public radar, aiming to create something resembling an anti-capitalist civil society by incremental steps. On occasion these have been aided by municipal socialist experiments, with a small number of Labour-controlled councils undertaking valuable projects in community wealth-building despite the enmity of the party leadership.

Such heterogeneous initiatives have generated a degree of energy to which Britain’s sclerotic Trotskyist and Communist grouplets cannot aspire. Alongside them has emerged a new left-media scene whose flagships are Tribune magazine, the semi-official megaphone of the Labour Left, and Novara Media, an online multimedia platform with roots in the student movement. Their writers are a regular presence at The World Transformed, a political education outlet that hosts workshops and panel discussions at its annual festival, scheduled to coincide with Labour conference. This intellectual culture draws on policy research from independent think tanks (Commonwealth, Autonomy, CLASS, New Economics Foundation) as well as a cluster of radical academics.

To prevent the collapse of its political ecosystem, the Left could do worse than cultivate these various flora and enable their cross-pollination. Once they have grown into a movement with clear demands and a popular mandate, a level-headed assessment of possible electoral vehicles will be needed. If Labour incurs successive defeats over the next decade, one might think that there would be scope to rebuild it from the ground up – with the trade unions exerting greater influence over a shrunken PLP. But if the Left is to infiltrate and reanimate a minor-league party constitutively hostile to its aims, is there a particular reason why it should be Labour? Are there disadvantages of entryism that could be circumvented by establishing a new institution altogether? These questions must be tabled over the coming years. More urgently, though, the UK needs an opposition worthy of the name – and Labour will not provide it any time soon.

Acknowledgements

Thanks first of all to Tom Hazeldine for giving the manuscript such close attention, and to Tariq Ali for his constant encouragement throughout the writing process. Perry Anderson and Susan Watkins provided comments on successive drafts from which I benefited immensely. I’m grateful to the editors at Novara, Clare Hymer, Charlotte England and Aaron Bastani, for publishing extracts from the book on their exciting platform. Thanks to Xavier Buxton for our conversations about Brexit; to Caitlín Doherty and John-Baptiste Oduor for their company while I worked on the book; to Simon Hammond for making me a better writer and editor; to Barnaby Raine for convincing me that the project was worthwhile; to my flatmates Indigo Wilde and Pavel Putley; and to my comrades Sam Dunnett, Kez Fender, Charlie Powell, Alyssa Steiner, Zad El Bacha and Alice Dann.

Notes

Introduction

    1 Polly Toynbee, ‘With Keir Starmer in charge of Labour, the Tories can be held to account again’, Guardian, 4 April 2021; Andrew Rawnsley, ‘Keir Starmer won the party handsomely. Now he must start convincing the nation’, Observer, 5 April 2020; Andrew Rawnsley, ‘The Tories are struggling to find a way to make Keir Starmer look bad’, Observer, 6 July 2020.

    2 Robert Peston, ‘Keir Starmer has shown he’s serious about winning power’, Spectator, 29 October 2020; Patrick O’Flynn, ‘Keir Starmer is showing the hysterical Left how effective opposition is done’, Telegraph, 22 April 2020; ‘We need an effective opposition to the government more than ever – Keir Starmer needs to build one’, Independent, 3 April 2020; ‘Keir Starmer: Labour’s electable new leader’, Economist, 11 April 2020; see Stephen Bush, ‘Keir Starmer’s Quest to Reshape Labour’, New Statesman, 9 September 2020; Patrick Kidd, ‘In a swoon over Sir Keir’, Times, 15 May 2020.

    3 Jack Peat, ‘Keir Starmer’s impressive CV will have the Tories running scared’, London Economic, 18 December 2019; Toynbee, ‘With Keir Starmer in charge of Labour, the Tories can be held to account again’; Patrick Maguire, ‘Keir Starmer: The Sensible Radical’.

    4 Jon Stone, ‘Labour’s Keir Starmer most popular opposition leader since Tony Blair, poll finds’, Independent, 12 June 2020; Toby Helm, ‘Starmer overtakes Johnson as preferred choice for prime minister’, Guardian, 27 June 2020; Michael Savage, ‘Keir Starmer winning Tory Leave voters for Labour – poll’, Guardian, 20 December 2020; Toby Helm, ‘Competent, likeable, decisive: Keir Starmer beating Boris Johnson on all counts’, Guardian, 11 July 2020; Nigel Morris, ‘Labour has wiped out Boris Johnson’s opinion poll lead, a survey finds’, i Paper, 30 August 2020.

    5 Luke O’Reilly, ‘Tory Party leads in new poll despite public’s disapproval of how Government has handled Covid’, London Evening Standard, 31 January 2021; Jon Stone, ‘Keir Starmer’s leadership ratings now worse than Jeremy Corbyn’s, polls show’, Independent, 11 May 2021.

    6 Andrew Fisher, ‘Labour members are the party’s most valuable asset – without them there is no route to government’, i newspaper, 11 May 2021; Andrew Fisher, ‘Labour finances: Redundancies show that by inspiring nobody, Keir Starmer is plunging the party into crisis’, i Paper, 20 July 2021.

    7 Toby Helm, ‘Keir Starmer: I’ll take my mask off and show why I should be prime minister’, Guardian, 3 April 2021; Patrick O’Flynn, ‘Keir Starmer’s fundamental problem’, Spectator, 17 July 2021.

    8 Rafael Behr, ‘Starmer’s credibility will soon be tested by the brutal economics of this crisis’, Guardian, 8 April 2020; ‘How Keir Starmer Got Stuck’, Economist, 18 February 2021; Stephen Bush, ‘A Consensus Is Forming among the Commentariat that Keir Starmer Is Not Up to the Job. Does It Matter?’, New Statesman, 3 February 2021; Tom Kibasi, ‘Keir Starmer’s leadership needs an urgent course correction’, Guardian, 16 February 2021; Simon Fletcher, ‘Keir Starmer’s Labour Desperately Needs to Stand for Something’, New Statesman, 28 June 2021.

    9 ‘Keir Starmer’s moment has come: he must not squander it’, Financial Times, 15 January 2022; Polly Toynbee, ‘Starmer has scotched Labour’s negatives, now bring on the positives’, Guardian, 23 December 2021.

  10 In an interview with the New Statesman, Starmer blamed the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash for Labour’s downward spiral. Harry Lambert, ‘Labour’s Lost Future: The Inside Story of a 20-Year Collapse’, New Statesman, 2 September 2021.

  11 Michael Ashcroft, Red Knight: The Unauthorised Biography of Keir Starmer, London: Biteback, 2021; Nigel Cawthorne, Keir Starmer: The Reluctant Politician, London: Gibson Square 2021.

1. The Lawyer

    1 Rebecca Ellinor, ‘Gypsy caravan burned in village bonfire’, Guardian, 31 October 2003.

    2 ‘Petrol bomb claim as travellers leave’, Argus, 7 June 2002; ‘Firle bonfire effigy shocked gipsy arson victims’, Argus, 10 November 2003.

    3 ‘Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC’, Masters of the Bench, middletemple.org.uk

    4 Lord Ashcroft, ‘King of the Middle Class Radicals’, Daily Mail, 12 June 2021.

    5 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 31; Jon Pike, ‘The young Keir Starmer’, martinplaut.com

    6 Ibid.

    7 Keir Starmer, ‘Wapping: End of the Street?’, Socialist Alternatives 2:1, April–May 1987, 7–8.

    8 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 52.

    9 ‘When Keir Starmer was a Marxist’, Another Green World, 4 April 2020; Patrick Maguire, ‘Keir Starmer: The Sensible Radical’, New Statesman, 31 March 2020.

  10 Keir Starmer, ‘Unions: For a New Pluralism’, Socialist Alternatives 1:3, December–January 1986–87, 25–7; Keir Starmer, ‘The End of Municipal Socialism?’, Socialist Alternatives 2:2, August–September 1987, 15–16.

  11 Keir Starmer, ‘Wapping: End of the Street?’, 8.

  12 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 53.

  13 Keir Starmer, ‘The Party’s Over – Acid House and the Law’, Socialist Lawyer 10: Winter–Spring 1990, 4–5.

  14 Keir Starmer, ‘The Concept of Socialist Law’, Socialist Lawyer 13: Spring 1991, 20.

  15 Keir Starmer, ‘Can the Entrenchment of Fundamental Rights Contribute to the Realization of Progressive Change?’, Socialist Lawyer 25: Autumn 1995, 6–7.

  16 Lamiat Sabin, ‘Starmer wanted to take socialism out of Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers’ name’, Morning Star, 12 February 2021.

  17 Catherine Baski, ‘Landmarks in law: McLibel and the longest trial in British legal history’, Guardian, 8 July 2019.

  18 Hinsliff, ‘Keir Starmer: Who is he, really?’; ‘Upholding the Rule of Law? Northern Ireland: Criminal Justice under the “Emergency Powers” in the 1990s’, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, 1992.

  19 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 71.

  20 ‘Former prisoner wins damages for attacks’, Guardian, 2 March 2001; ‘IRA man sues prison’, Irish Independent, 10 April 2000.

  21 Paul Vallely, ‘Private Clegg’s friends in high places’, Independent, 5 June 1995.

  22 Hinsliff, ‘Keir Starmer: Who is he, really?’

  23 Heather Stewart, ‘Keir Starmer had no enemies. Can he keep it that way?’, Guardian, 27 March 2020.

  24 Keir Starmer, European Human Rights Law: The Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights, London: Legal Action Group, 1999.

  25 ‘Northern Ireland Peace Process: Background and Challenges’, 9 December 2004, everycrsreport.com; Denis Bradley, ‘Memory is still the reason why Sinn Fein is boycotting the PSNI’, Irish Times, 6 July 2002.

  26 Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, ‘The Functions of the Northern Ireland Policing Board’, 15 October 2004.

  27 Gerry Moriarty, ‘Sinn Fein protests as PSNI praised’, Irish Times, 8 March 2005.

  28 Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Loyalist parade sparks riots in Catholic area’, Guardian, 13 July 2004.

  29 ‘Police cleared over riot tactics’, BBC News, 4 November 2004.

  30 See ‘NI police chief denies taser link’, Irish Times, 25 September 2007.

  31 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 95–6.

  32 Clare Dyer and Alan Travis, ‘Torture ruling leaves terror policy in chaos’, Guardian, 9 December 2005.

  33 Keir Starmer, ‘Sorry, Mr Blair, but 1441 does not authorise force ‘, Guardian, 17 March 2003.

  34 See Clare Dyer, ‘UK limits Jamaica death sentence’, Guardian, 8 July 2004; Martin Kettle, ‘What Does Keir Starmer Believe?’, Prospect, 28 February 2020; Jack Peat, ‘Keir Starmer’s impressive CV will have the Tories running scared’, London Economic, 18 December 2019.

  35 ‘A Test for Imposing Sentence of Death’, Caribbean Death Penalty Research: caribbeandeathpenaltyresearch.wordpress.com

  36 Ben Silverstone, ‘Meet the Director – Keir Starmer’, Counsel Magazine, 31 January 2009.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Ken Macdonald, ‘Keir Starmer proves the case for not having a prosecutor as DPP’, Guardian, 27 April 2013.

  39 See Karen Soza, ‘In the Public Interest’, Policy Exchange, 14 December 2012: ‘Although Macdonald is a member of the Bar, his view was that the DPP’s priority was professionalising the CPS, even if that came at the price of relations with the Bar. Some consider that Keir Starmer has been much more delicate in his dealings with the Bar. This has resulted in decisions like capping the CPS’s share of advocacy, a decision which serves no benefit to the CPS.’

  40 Tom D. Rogers, ‘Keir Starmer billed taxpayer £160k for chauffeur driven car to drive him 4 miles to work whilst he was director of public prosecutions’, bywire, 29 April 2021; ‘Chief prosecutor claims £250 a day for chauffeur driven car’, Telegraph, 15 February 2010.

  41 Afua Hirsch and Robert Booth, ‘CPS will not prosecute relatives who help terminally ill to die’, Guardian, 10 December 2008.

  42 Stephen Sedley, ‘A Decent Death’, London Review of Books, 21 October 2021.

  43 House of Commons Justice Committee, ‘The Crown Prosecution Service: Gatekeeper of the Criminal Justice System’, 15 July 2009.

  44 Martin Kettle, ‘What Does Keir Starmer Believe?’, Prospect, 28 February 2020.

  45 See Jamie Bridge and Maria-Goretti Loglo, ‘Drug Laws in West Africa: A Review and Summary’, International Drug Policy Consortium, November 2017.

  46 William Hague, ‘Countering Terrorism Overseas’, gov.uk, 14 February 2013.

  47 See the 2014 Human Rights Watch reports on each country, available at hrw.org

  48 William Hague, ‘Countering Terrorism Overseas’.

  49 Antony Salmon, ‘Queen’s Counsel Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales Visits Sierra Leone’, Sierra Express Media, 3 March 2010.

  50 In Tunisia, those attempting to emigrate were detained by security forces and denied access to lawyers as part of a systematic effort to restrict their right to seek asylum. In Ethiopia, a law was drafted instituting the death penalty for alleged people smugglers. Vasja Badali, ‘Tunisia’s Role in the EU External Migration Policy: Crimmigration Law, Illegal Practices, and Their Impact on Human Rights’, Journal of International Migration and Integration 20: June 2018; ‘Ethiopia drafts law containing death penalty to combat human trafficking’, Ezega News, 16 October 2019.

  51 Cahal Milmo, ‘Christopher Tappin jailed for 33 months for arms-to-Iran scheme’, Independent, 9 January 2013.

  52 See Janis Sharp, Saving Gary McKinnon: A Mother’s Story, London: Bite-back, 2013, chapter 20.

  53 ‘Boris Johnson: Justice for Gary McKinnon has prevailed’, ITV News, 16 October 2012.

  54 Peter Stäuber, ‘A Poet Imprisoned’, Red Pepper, 16 October 2014.

  55 ‘Statement of Support: Noam Chomsky’, freetalha.org

  56 Owen Bowcott, ‘DPP refuses private prosecution of two terror suspects’, Guardian, 1 October 2012.

  57 House of Lords Select Committee on Extradition Law, Rt Hon. Sir Scott Baker and Anand Doobay – oral evidence, 8 July 2014, 60.

  58 Ewen MacAskill and Sam Jones, ‘Wikileaks cables: US looks to prosecute Julian Assange’, Guardian, 6 December 2010.

  59 John Pilger, ‘Getting Julian Assange: The Untold Story’, johnpilger. com, 20 May 2017.

  60 Owen Bowcott and Ewen McAskill, ‘Sweden tried to drop Assange extradition in 2013, CPS emails show’, Guardian, 11 February 2018.

  61 Matt Kennard, ‘Five questions for new Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer about his UK and US national security establishment links’, Grayzone, 5 June 2020.

  62 Bill Goodwin, ‘CPS Faces Legal Ruling over Refusal to Disclose Emails with US on WikiLeaks and Assange Extradition’, Computer Weekly, 2 July 2019.

  63 Ewen MacAskill and Owen Bowcott, ‘UK prosecutors admit destroying key emails in Julian Assange case’, Guardian, 10 November 2017.

  64 ‘Attorney General Holder’s Calendar’, 9 November 2011, available at justice.gov

  65 Kennard, ‘Five questions’.

  66 Keir Starmer, written evidence submitted by the Crown Prosecution Service: DPP’s findings in relation to ‘phone hacking’, July 2009, parliament.uk.

  67 See Mohamed’s case file on therenditionproject.org.uk

  68 ‘MI5 telegrams “fed interrogation” ‘, BBC News, 7 March 2009.

  69 ‘No charges for MI5 officer accused over Binyam Mohamed’, BBC News, 7 November 2010.

  70 Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘MI5 officer escapes charges over Binyam Mohamed torture case’, Guardian, 17 November 2010.

  71 See Ian Cobain, ‘UK investigations into torture and rendition – a guide’, Guardian, 26 March 2012 and ‘Police asked to examine claims of British intelligence role in torture’, Guardian, 13 January 2012.

  72 Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Inquiry finds Gaza war crimes from both sides’, New York Times, 15 September 2009.

  73 Marcus Dysch, ‘Consent refused for Livni UK arrest warrant’, Jewish Chronicle, 6 October 2011.

  74 Adam Fresco, ‘De Menezes officer investigated after admitting deleting evidence’, Times, 14 October 2008.

  75 Tom Morgan and Margaret Davis, ‘Menezes jury rejects police claim of lawful killing’, Independent, 12 December 2008.

  76 ‘Family of Jean Charles de Menezes end battle for justice after DPP refuses to prosecute cops over shooting’, Daily Record, 14 February 2009.

  77 Vikram Dodd, ‘Second expert has “no doubt” PC’s actions contributed to G20 death’, Guardian, 22 July 2010.

  78 Steve Doughty, ‘Three G4S security guards will not face prosecution over death of Angolan deportee’, Daily Mail, 18 July 2012; ‘Jury rules Jimmy Mubenga was unlawfully killed’, Inquest, 9 July 2019.

  79 Jon Clements, ‘Secret report says Blair Peach was almost certainly killed by riot cop’, Daily Mirror, 28 April 2010.

  80 Harmit Athwal, ‘Snail’s pace in deaths in custody investigations’, Institute of Race Relations, 6 February 2014.

  81 Ellie Mae O’Hagan, ‘Undercover police aren’t above the law’, Guardian, 13 June 2012.

  82 Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Rowenna Davis, ‘Ex-wife of police spy tells how she fell in love and had children with him’, Guardian, 19 January 2011.

  83 Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, ‘Call for police links to animal rights fire-bombing to be investigated’, Guardian, 13 June 2012.

  84 Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, ‘Undercover police officer unlawfully spied on climate activists, judges rule’, Guardian, 20 July 2011.

  85 Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, ‘Police spying: Secret tapes that put CPS on the spot’, Guardian, 7 June 2011.

  86 Matt Dickinson, ‘Inquiry call over climate campaign undercover police officer’, Independent, 10 January 2011.

  87 Olly Knowles, ‘Complete silence from politicians over conduct of undercover police officers’, Guardian, 13 January 2012.

  88 Sir Christopher Rose, ‘Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station Protest: Inquiry into Disclosure’, December 2011, available at statewatch.org

  89 Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, ‘Undercover police and the law: The men who weren’t there’, Guardian, 19 October 2011.

  90 David Weisbloom, ‘Prosecutor facing action over undercover policeman’, Channel 4 News, 6 December 2011.

  91 ‘Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station (Operation Aeroscope) Disclosure’, IPCC 2011, 17.

  92 O’Hagan, ‘Undercover police aren’t above the law’.

  93 Knowles, ‘Complete silence from politicians over conduct of under-cover police officers’.

  94 Melanie Newman and Oliver Wright, ‘Revealed: Thousands of rape cases thrown out as charges fall following new CPS guidelines’, Independent, 4 February 2014.

  95 Jane Martinson, ‘Keir Starmer to launch inquiry into fall in reports of rape and domestic violence’, Guardian, 10 July 2013.

  96 Melanie Newman, ‘Prosecutor Intervention behind Dramatic Fall in Rape Cases Sent for Charging’, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 3 February 2014.

  97 Newman and Wright, ‘Revealed: Thousands of rape cases thrown out as charges fall following new CPS guidelines’.

  98 Emily Thornberry, ‘CPS Backslides on Rape Prosecutions’, letter to Keir Starmer and Dominic Grieve, 25 September 2012, emilythornberry.com

  99 ‘Keir Starmer’s Record on Rape’, Women Against Rape, 7 February 2020, womenagainstrape.net

100 See Keir Starmer’s introduction to Alison Levitt QC, ‘Charging Perverting the Course of Justice and Wasting Police Time in Cases Involving Allegedly False Rape and Domestic Violence Accusations: Joint Report to the Director of Public Prosecutions’, cps.gov.uk

101 Peter Dominiczak, ‘G20 bra girl charged for posing as a police officer’, London Evening Standard, 28 September 2009.

102 Paul Lewis, ‘Jury acquits G20 protester accused of being ringleader in clashes’, Guardian, 11 June 2010.

103 Josephine Huetlin, ‘Student protestor Alfie Meadows cleared of violence’, Varsity, 14 March 2013. The CPS brought similar charges against Omar Ibrahim, a participant in the 2011 TUC march who picked up a joke-shop smoke bomb and threw it in the direction of a Topshop outlet. He was jailed for eighteen months.

104 Nadine El-Enany, ‘Keir Starmer’s troubling guidelines on protester prosecution’, Guardian, 7 March 2012.

105 ‘New CPS Guidelines’, 10 March 2012, defendtherighttoprotest.org

106 ‘The August 2011 Riots: A Statistical Summary’, House of Commons Library, 4 November 2011.

107 ‘UK riots: Trouble erupts in English cities’, BBC News, 10 August 2011.

108 Carly Lightowlers and Hannah Quirk, ‘The 2011 English “Riots”: Prosecutorial Zeal and Judicial Abandon’, British Journal of Criminology 55:1, 5.

109 ‘UK riots: Trouble erupts in English cities’, BBC News; Lightowlers and Quirk, ‘The 2011 English “Riots” ‘; ‘Riot sentence “feeding frenzy” claims anger magistrates’, BBC News, 29 August 2011; Fiona Bawdon and Owen Bowcott, ‘Chaos in the courts as justice system rushed to restore order’, Guardian, 3 July 2012.

110 Fiona Bawdon and Owen Bowcott, ‘Chaos in the courts as justice system rushed to restore order’, Guardian, 3 July 2012.

111 Lightowlers and Quirk, ‘The 2011 English “Riots” ‘, 6–7.

112 Ibid.

113 Fiona Bawdon, Paul Lewis and Tim Newburn, ‘Rapid riot prosecutions more important than long sentences, says Keir Starmer’, Guardian, 3 July 2012.

114 Morgan Paulett, ‘Keir Starmer: Riots and Spycops’, Medium, 4 June 2020.

115 CPS, ‘Public Disorder – August 2011 Guidance for Prosecutors on Charging Public Order and Other offences’, August 2011; Lightowlers and Quirk, ‘The 2011 English “Riots” ‘, 8.

116 Lightowlers and Quirk, ‘The 2011 English “Riots” ‘, 6.

117 Paul Peachey, ‘Deportation looms for the man who stole an ice cream’, Independent, 6 August 2012.

118 ‘Manchester riots: Doughnut thief jailed for 16 months’, BBC News, 18 August 2011.

119 Polly Curtis and Vikram Dodd, ‘Riot sentence rift opens between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives’, Guardian, 17 August 2011.

120 John Hall, ‘Benefit cheats face 10 years in prison as Keir Starmer sets out “tough” new Crown Prosecution Service guidelines’, Independent, 16 September 2013.

121 Charlie Gorst and Harry Croxford, ‘Inside: Keir Starmer’s Time at the CPS’, Just Debate, 8 June 2020.

122 Michael Mutch and Matthew Dresch, ‘“Hard working and decent” mum jailed for £20,000 benefit fraud’, Daily Mirror, 9 June 2020.

123 ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefit System: Preliminary 2012/13 Estimates (Great Britain)’, Department for Work and Pensions report, 9 May 2013.

124 ‘Tax: Evasion and avoidance in the UK’, Full Fact, 7 October 2016.

125 See Afua Hirsch, ‘Superdatabase tracking all calls and emails legitimate, says DPP’, Guardian, 9 January 2009; and www.parliament.uk

126 Ian Dunt, ‘The snoopers’ charter backlash’, politics.co.uk, 11 June 2013.

127 Kennard, ‘Five questions’; Ashcroft, Red Knight, 108.

128 Alasdair Palmer, ‘John Yates: Phone hacking investigation was a “cock up” ‘, Telegraph, 9 July 2011.

129 ‘With the benefit of hindsight, Mr Starmer has since said that it would have been better if, before Mr Perry committed himself, he had been given more time along with the opportunity to check his papers.’ ‘Leveson Inquiry – Report into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press’, 29 November 2012, 384.

130 ‘John Yates and Keir Starmer “culpable” for phone hacking, say MPs’, Huffington Post, 1 May 2012.

131 ‘Keir Starmer stepping down from DPP role’, BBC News, 24 April 2013.

132 Maguire, ‘Keir Starmer: The Sensible Radical’.

133 ‘Keir Starmer QC: A Radical Lawyer Gets Tough’, Lawyer, 25 January 2010.

134 Silverstone, ‘Meet the Director’.

135 Andrew Murray, Is Socialism Possible in Britain? Refelections on the Corbyn Years, forthcoming from Verso.

136 An emblem of this transformation was Starmer’s invitation to join the Trilateral Commission: an organization founded by David Rockerfeller in 1973 and populated by a transnational collective of centrist politicians, bankers, CEOs and officials from the American intelligence agencies, who meet regularly to discuss public policy. The Trilateral Commission famously released a report which explored how to deal with the ‘excess of democracy’ in developed countries, concluding that ‘the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups’. See Noam Chomsky, ‘The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality’, chomsky.info

2. The Politician

    1 Sarah Downey, ‘Mishcon turns to former DPP Keir Starmer to bolster business crime unit’, Legal Business, 23 June 2014.

    2 ‘Miliband Delays Holborn Selection Process for Keir Starmer’, Guido Fawkes, 4 November 2014.

    3 Matthew Weaver, ‘Labour activists urge Keir Starmer to stand for party leadership’, Guardian, 15 May 2015.

    4 Owen Jones, This Land: The Story of a Movement, London: Allen Lane, 2020, 45.

    5 Rowena Mason, ‘Labour’s Andy Burnham suggests he might back further welfare cuts’, Guardian, 29 May 2015; Rowena Mason, ‘Burnham “would resign from Corbyn cabinet” over Nato and Trident stance’, Guardian, 25 August 2015; ‘Labour’s Andy Burnham backs overhaul in surveillance law’, BBC News, 4 November 2015; Andy McSmith, ‘I’d be proud to follow Blair and Brown’s lead, says Burnham’, Independent, 23 October 2011.

    6 Alex Matthews-King, ‘Landmark study links Tory austerity to 120,000 deaths’, Independent, 16 November 2017.

    7 ‘New Holborn and St Pancras MP Keir Starmer: Why I abstained on welfare bill’, Islington Tribune, 21 July 2015. In one of Starmer’s first parliamentary interventions, he submitted a written question to the home secretary, Theresa May, asking whether she would consider introducing a special medal to honour long-serving police officers. May’s office politely informed him that such a medal already existed.

    8 Abbie Llewelyn, ‘Labour snub: How Keir Starmer campaigned against Jeremy Corbyn in crucial vote’, Daily Express, 14 January 2020.

    9 Richard Osley, ‘Emily Thornberry tells Labour Party there’s “no room for sulking” after Corbyn’s victory in leadership contest’, Camden New Journal, 12 September 2015.

  10 Brian Wheeler, ‘Jeremy Corbyn “not the Messiah”, says Keir Starmer’, BBC News, 29 September 2015.

  11 Kelly Fiveash, ‘Investigatory Powers Bill passes through Commons after Labour backs Tory spy law’, Ars Technica, 7 June 2016.

  12 ‘People vs Snooper’s Charter: Liberty’s Landmark Challenge to Mass Surveillance Powers Heard in High Court’, 17 June 2019, libertyhuman rights.org

  13 Glyn Moody, ‘Pressure grows to rethink Snooper’s Charter as Labour winds back its support’, Ars Technica, 16 February 2016.

  14 Keir Starmer, ‘We need to get this investigatory powers bill right – it’s not fit for purpose now’, Guardian, 15 March 2016.

  15 Keir Starmer, ‘Airstrikes in Syria are lawful, but I’ll be voting against them’, Guardian, 30 November 2016.

  16 Jon Stone, ‘Labour frontbenchers are going on an immigration “listening tour” around Britain’, Independent, 6 February 2016.

  17 Ashcroft, Red Knight, 143.

  18 Caroline Mortimer, ‘Labour MP Rachel Reeves: Riots could sweep streets of Britain if immigration is not curbed after Brexit’, Independent, 28 September 2016.

  19 The Andrew Marr Show, 9 October 2016, news.bbc.co.uk

  20 John McDonnell, ‘Brexit Witness Archive’, UK in a Changing Europe, 19 February 2021.

  21 Daniel Boffey, ‘Hilary Benn seeks shadow cabinet backing to oust Corbyn’, Guardian, 25 June 2016.

  22 Mikey Smith, ‘Did Jeremy Corbyn really give 122 speeches during the EU referendum campaign?’, Daily Mirror, 12 August 2016.

  23 Jones, This Land, 79–80.

  24 twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/747435929942560768

  25 Martin Shipton, ‘Owen Smith on the Iraq War, working as a lobbyist and the private sector’s role in the NHS’, Wales Online, 13 July 2016.

  26 Jim Waterson, ‘How the Labour Coup Failed’, BuzzFeed, 23 September 2016.

  27 Julia Rampen, ‘Keir Starmer MP: Choosing Ideological Purity before Power Is a Dereliction of Duty’, New Statesman, 25 July 2016.

  28 Rachel Roberts, ‘Camden Labour divided: Starmer confirms support for Smith as Hampstead and Kilburn backs Corbyn’, Ham & High, 8 August 2016.

  29 Natalie Evans and Dan Bloom, ‘Listen to moment Owen Smith made joke that led to 29-inch penis row’, Daily Mirror, 3 September 2016.

  30 Rowena Mason, ‘Smith’s policies are copied from Corbyn, says Labour leader’s team’, Guardian, 27 July 2016.

  31 Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, ‘Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn wins convincing victory over Owen Smith’, Guardian, 24 September 2016.

  32 Owen Bowcott, ‘Keir Starmer visits Taiwan to lobby against death penalty’, Guardian, 29 September 2018.

  33 Jim Pickard, ‘Keir Starmer: The Brexit opponent making Labour heard on Europe’, Financial Times, 17 October 2016.

  34 Adam Bienkov, ‘John McDonnell backs Brexit as “enormous opportunity” for Britain’, politics.co.uk, 15 November 2016.

  35 Heather Stewart, ‘Brexit: Keir Starmer presses for “detailed” plan as MPs vote to trigger article 50’, Guardian, 8 December 2016.

  36 Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn, London: Bodley Head, 2020, 69.

  37 ‘Article 50 – Volume 620: Debated on Tuesday 24 January 2017’, hansard. parliament.uk

  38 Matthew Weaver, ‘UK may have to pay EU in Temporary customs union, Davis suggest’, Guardian, 15 August 2017.

  39 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 69.

  40 Michael Settle, ‘Sir Keir Starmer: Britain would stay in EU if government fail to secure Brussels deal’, Herald, 25 April 2017.

  41 John Sparrow and Chris Johnston, ‘Starmer’s speech and Q&A – summary and analysis’, Guardian, 25 April 2017.

  42 Julia Rampen, ‘Labour’s Best General Election Bet Is Keir Starmer’, New Statesman, 25 April 2017.

  43 James Schneider, ‘Brexit Witness Archive’, UK in a Changing Europe, 11 January 2021.

  44 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Speech of the 2017 General Election Campaign’, Labour Party Press Archive, 20 April 2017.

  45 McDonnell, ‘Brexit Witness Archive’.

  46 Vyara Apostolova et al., ‘General Election 2017: Results and Analysis’, House of Commons Library, 29 January 2019, 26–7.

  47 Jon Stone, ‘Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds’, Independent, 13 April 2021. Cf Patrick Henegham’s blog post, ‘Labour’s 2017 campaign and the myth of the stab in the back’, 27 August 2000.

  48 Harriet Agerholm, ‘Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from chance to be prime minister’, Independent, 9 June 2017.

  49 Jones, This Land, 161–2.

  50 Ibid., 184.

  51 Schneider, ‘Brexit Witness Archive’.

  52 ‘Theresa May’s Brexit Strategy Risks a Cliff-Edge for the Economy and Is a Threat to Jobs and Investment – Starmer’, Labour Press Archive, 6 July 2017.

  53 Keir Starmer, ‘No “constructive ambiguity”. Labour will avoid Brexit cliff edge for UK economy’, Guardian, 26 August 2017.

  54 See J. White and Alex Gordon, ‘The EU Single Market Is Incompatible with Labour’s Manifesto’, openDemocracy, 9 August 2017.

  55 Richard Johnson, ‘Why the Internationalist Left Should Oppose the EU Customs Union’, Briefings for Britain, 1 April 2019.

  56 See Francis Beckett, ‘The inside story of the election defeat that doomed Labour and sealed Brexit’, The New European, 11 December 2020, and Heather Stewart, ‘Keir Starmer clashed with Corbyn on Brexit “to brink of resignation” ‘, Guardian, 18 September 2018.

  57 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 72.

  58 The Andrew Marr Show, 25 February 2018, news.bbc.co.uk

  59 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 74.

  60 Steven Swinford, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is selling “snake oil” over Brexit, says David Davis’, Telegraph, 25 February 2018.

  61 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 137.

  62 Joe Watts, ‘The angry union boss, the archaic rules, the coffee breath: The inside story of the meeting that decided Labour’s Brexit policy’, Independent, 24 September 2018.

  63 ‘Labour’s Brexit composite motion in full’, LabourList, 26 September 2018.

  64 Peter Walker, Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot, ‘McDonnell: New Brexit referendum should not include remain option’, Guardian, 24 September 2018.

  65 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 141–2.

  66 Ibid., 143.

  67 Matthew Weaver, ‘Brexit: Labour likely to vote down May’s deal, says Starmer’, Guardian, 25 September 2018.

  68 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 191.

  69 Nicholas Mairs, ‘Labour in Brexit U-turn as Keir Starmer admits “any deal” would need Irish backstop’, PoliticsHome, 20 January 2019.

  70 Lizzy Buchan, ‘Keir Starmer says Brexit “can be stopped”, contradicting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’, Independent, 12 November 2018.

  71 For a comprehensive rebuttal of the antisemitism accusations against Corbyn, see Antisemitism and the Labour Party, ed. Jamie Stern-Weiner, London: Verso, 2019. Starmer attacked Len McCluskey for suggesting that such accusations were politically motivated, and cynically pressured Corbyn to be ‘louder’ on the issue.

  72 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Lays Out Labour’s Five Brexit Demands in Letter to Theresa May’, Labour Press Archive, 6 February 2019.

  73 Emilio Casalicchio, ‘Labour split erupts over Brexit as Keir Starmer suggests general election plan no longer “credible” ‘, PoliticsHome, 13 February 2019.

  74 Matthew Weaver, ‘Keir Starmer: Labour’s Brexit stance is either credible deal or remain’, Guardian, 26 February 2019.

  75 This was a possibility that John McDonnell had foreseen back in 2016; during the first shadow cabinet reshuffle he tried to convince Corbyn to replace the right-wing whips, but the leader refused for fear that it would trigger a coup.

  76 When Amy Jackson told one prominent pro-PV Labour politician that his efforts were sabotaging the party’s electoral chances, he replied, ‘I understand the difficulties you’re in. Basically, our strategy is to be the last ones standing in Brexit debate.’

  77 Katie Harris, ‘Labour Party rebels unite: Rachel Riley and J. K. Rowling attend secret anti-Corbyn meeting’, Daily Express, 11 February 2019.

  78 ‘Updated General Election Voting Intention. England and Wales’, survation.com, 11 April 2019.

  79 See Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 210–12.

  80 Jones, This Land, 205.

  81 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 214.

  82 Jones, This Land, 205.

  83 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 215.

  84 Paul Mason, ‘Corbynism is now in crisis: The only way forward is to oppose Brexit’, Guardian, 27 May 2019; Owen Jones, ‘A second referendum is a bad option for Labour. But it may be the only one left’, Guardian, 27 May 2019; Owen Jones, ‘“Soft” Brexit is dead. Now Labour must really embrace a people’s vote’, Guardian, 27 June 2019.

  85 Rowena Mason and Jessica Elgot, ‘Corbyn backs referendum on Brexit deal after EU election exodus’, Guardian, 28 May 2019.

  86 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 226.

  87 ‘Boris Johnson: “We are the party of the people” ‘, facebook.com/watch

  88 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 229.

  89 Matt Chorley, ‘Keir Starmer: Prorogation has forced everyone to ask themselves which side they are on?’, Times, 30 August 2019.

  90 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 251.

  91 Elliot Chappell, ‘How popular are Labour’s radical manifesto policies?’, LabourList, 25 November 2019.

3. The Candidate

    1 On the assumed correlation between age, homeownership and reactionary politics, see Samuel Earle, ‘It’s the Housing Market, Stupid: How Property Became the Battle Line of British Politics’, Novara Media, 21 May 2021; George Eaton, ‘How Tory Dominance Is Built on Home Ownership’, New Statesman, 12 May 2021; and Keir Milburn, Generation Left, London: Polity, 2019, chapter 5.

    2 Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Does Labour face terminal decline?’, Politics Theory Other, 3 June 2021.

    3 See Gilbert’s six-part series on openDemocracy, starting with ‘It Was the Centrist Dads Who Lost It’, openDemocracy, 13 January 2020.

    4 Jones, This Land, 208, 165, 93.

    5 Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review, 1:150, March–April 1985.

    6 Michael Ashcroft, ‘How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday … and why’, Lord Ashcroft Polls, 24 June 2016.

    7 Patrick English, ‘Is the stereotypical image of “Red Wall” residents actually accurate?’, YouGov, 17 May 2021.

    8 See the Ipsos MORI 2015 and 2017 election analyses at ipsos.com

    9 twitter.com/holski_beat

  10 See Philip McCann, ‘Perceptions of regional inequality and the geography of discontent: insights from the UK’, Regional Studies, 54: 2, 256–67, 19 June 2019, 256–67.

  11 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 347.

  12 Tom Kibasi, ‘Keir Starmer’s leadership needs an urgent course correction’, Guardian, 16 February 2021.

  13 Michael Savage, ‘Keir Starmer: “We can blame each other and argue – or pull together and win”, Guardian, 22 February 2020.

  14 Owen Hatherley, ‘There’s a Starmer Waiting in the Sky’, Medium, 13 February 2020.

  15 Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Family, Faith and Flag’, New Statesman, 7 April 2011.

  16 ‘Exposed: The (elected and unelected) “Labour” MP’s funded by Sir Trevor Chinn’, Dorset Eye, 6 June 2020.

  17 David Miller et al., ‘The UK’s Pro-Israel Lobby in Context ‘, openDemocracy, 2 December 2013.

  18 Michelle McGagh, ‘Call not to hammer the super rich with taxes’, City-wire, 30 September 2008.

  19 Michael Savage, ‘Hedge fund donor to Labour backs ex-Para for leader’, Times, 4 March 2016; Rajeev Syal, ‘New anti-Corbyn group is funded by former Tony Blair spin doctor’, Guardian, 21 September 2016.

  20 Keir Starmer, ‘My Pledges to You’, keirstarmer.com

  21 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 335.

  22 Aaron Bastani, ‘The Man behind the Keir Starmer Campaign, and His Links to Owen Smith’, Novara Media, 23 December 2019.

  23 youtube.com

  24 See ‘Changes to the Register of Members’ Interests: Keir Starmer’, theyworkforyou.com

  25 Nicola Bartlett, ‘Keir Starmer publishes leadership campaign donations amid transparency row’, Daily Mirror, 3 March 2020.

  26 Lamiat Sabin, ‘All four Labour leadership candidates declare themselves Zionists or supporters of Zionism’, Morning Star, 14 February 2020.

  27 twitter.com/PeoplesMomentum

  28 Rebecca Long-Bailey, ‘We can take the Labour party back into power. Here’s how’, Guardian, 29 December 2019.

  29 ‘Leadership and Deputy Leadership Election 2020 – Results’, Labour Party, 4 April 2020.

4. The Leader

    1 Andrew Rawnsley and Toby Helm: ‘“We have a mountain to climb”: Keir Starmer on winning the next election’, Guardian, 4 October 2020; Jim Pickard, ‘Labour party looks to Biden for inspiration’, Financial Times, 19 January 2021.

    2 Kevin Schofield, ‘Keir Starmer’s victory speech after being named new Labour leader’, PoliticsHome, 4 April 2020.

    3 Elliot Chappell and Andrew Kersley, ‘Sunday shows: Labour will back “whatever measures the government takes” on Covid restrictions’, LabourList, 20 September 2020.

    4 Stephen Bush, ‘Can Keir Starmer Break Labour’s Losing Streak?’, New Statesman, 15 September 2021.

    5 Claire Ainsley, The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes, Bristol: Policy Press, 2018, 20, 48, 7, 38, 153, 47, 42.

    6 Ibid., 57, 107–9, 126–8, 132–4.

    7 Keir Starmer, ‘Labour can win again if we make the moral case for socialism’, Guardian, 15 January 2020.

    8 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, 348.

    9 Tom Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party – I’, New Left Review, 1:27, September–October 1964, 45.

  10 Starmer, ‘Labour can win again if we make the moral case for socialism’.

  11 ‘Labour’s Keir Starmer “bitterly disappointed” at UK election results’, facebook.com/watch

  12 Rivkah Brown and Aaron Bastani, ‘Keir Starmer Has Launched an Unprecedented Crackdown on Rebel MPs’, Novara Media, 16 October 2020.

  13 Tom Blackburn, ‘Starmer’s War on Grassroots Politics’, Tribune, 8 February 2021; Michael Deacon, ‘Labour members quitting in droves? That’s the best news Keir Starmer’s had all year’, Telegraph, 28 November 2020; Rowena Mason, ‘Labour votes to ban four far-left factions that supported Corbyn’s leadership’, Guardian, 20 July 2021; twitter.com/bbcpolitics

  14 Greg Philo and Mike Berry, ‘Bad News for Labour: A Response to Channel 4’s “FactCheck” ‘, Pluto Press Blog, plutobooks.com

  15 Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, ‘Smoke Without Fire: The Myth of a ‘“Labour Antisemitism Crisis”’, Jewish Voice for Labour, 26 November 2019; L. Daniel Staetsky, ‘Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain: A Study of Attitudes towards Jews and Israel’, Institute for Jewish Policy Research report, September 2017; publications. parliament.uk

  16 Lee Harpin, ‘Board president: “It’s like Jeremy Corbyn has declared war on the Jews”’, Jewish Chronicle, 22 August 2018; Kevin Rawlinson and Pippa Crerar, ‘Jewish newspapers claim Corbyn poses “existential threat” ‘, Guardian, 26 July 2018; twitter.com/jamesefoster

  17 Greg Philo, ‘How Labour Became “Antisemitic” ‘, Jacobin, 10 May 2019.

  18 Lee Harpin, ‘Stephen Kinnock reprimanded by Labour over Israel “proceeds of crime” Commons speech’, Jewish Chronicle, 25 October 2020.

  19 Rayhan Uddin, ‘Keir Starmer ignores Palestinian letter amid iftar cancellation controversy’, Middle East Eye, 23 April 2020; Sienna Rodgers, ‘Lloyd Russell-Moyle quits frontbench citing “right-wing media campaign” ‘, LabourList, 16 July 2020; Ghada Karmi, ‘Starmer’s silence on Palestinian solidarity day speaks volumes’, Middle East Eye, 1 December 2020; Nasim Ahmed, ‘Starmer is failing to unite Britain’s Labour Party’, Middle East Monitor, 3 December 2020; Nadine White, ‘Labour Palestinian members say party is “ignoring them” ‘, Independent, 11 May 2021; Asa Winstanley, ‘New Labour purge against Israel critics’, Electronic Intifada, 20 May 2020; Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, ‘Reinstate the Waver-tree Four! Defend Free Speech and Party Democracy!’, Jewish Voice for Labour, 12 June 2020.

  20 ‘Maxine Peake: “People who couldn’t vote Labour because of Corbyn? They voted Tory as far as I’m concerned” ‘, Independent, 25 June 2020. Peake later acknowledged that there was no evidence that this particular police tactic had been learned from the Israelis. See Daniel Finn, ‘Perceptions and Reality’, Sidecar, 3 February 2021; Sheren Khalel, ‘US police departments under pressure to end training programmes with Israel’, Middle East Eye, 22 June 2020; Georgina Lee, ‘Did Israeli secret service teach Floyd police to kneel on neck?’, Channel 4 News Fact Check, 26 June 2020.

  21 Asa Winstanley, ‘UK Labour Party hires former Israeli spy’, Electronic Intifada, 19 January 2021; Jenni Frazer, ‘Four years on, British and Israeli Labour parties are on friendly terms again’, Jewish Chronicle, 20 April 2021; see also Ben White, ‘Don’t believe the hype about Israel’s Labour Party being progressive – it’s just proven that it’s decidedly not’, Independent, 17 October 2017; ‘Lisa Nandy Responds to Escalating Violence in Israel and Gaza’, Labour Party, 12 May 2021.

  22 Sienna Rodgers, ‘Corbyn claims Labour antisemitism was “dramatically overstated” ‘, LabourList, 29 October 2020.

  23 Chloe Chaplain, ‘Keir Starmer condemns claim anti-semitism in Labour is exaggerated but stops short of criticising Corbyn’, i newspaper, 29 October 2020.

  24 Ronan Burtenshaw, ‘Labour’s Members Are in Revolt against Keir Starmer’, Tribune, 20 November 2020; Oliver Milne, ‘Jeremy Corbyn row deepens as allies threaten to cut off Labour election cash’, Daily Mirror, 19 November 2020; Jessica Elgot, ‘Labour MPs and members ordered not to discuss Corbyn’s suspension’, Guardian, 27 November 2020; Greg Heffer, ‘Labour antisemitism: Angela Rayner warns “thousands and thousands” of members could be suspended’, Sky News, 29 November 2020; Tariq Ali, ‘Starmer’s War’, Sidecar, 15 December 2020.

  25 ‘Investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party’, 27.

  26 Ibid., 7–9, 56.

  27 See Aaron Bastani, ‘In Suspending Jeremy Corbyn, Did the Labour Leadership Ignore the EHRC’s Key Recommendation?’, Novara Media, 12 November 2020; and Alex Nunns’s commentary on Twitter: twitter. com/alexnunns

  28 Sienna Rodgers, ‘Corbyn on suspension: “I hope this matter is resolved as quickly as possible” ‘, LabourList, 17 November 2020.

  29 Lisa O’Carroll, ‘Jewish Labour Movement condemns Corbyn’s readmission’,Guardian, 17 November 2020; ‘Decision to Reinstate Jeremy Corbyn to Labour Party Is a “Retrograde Step” ‘, Board of Deputies of British Jews, 17 November 2020.

  30 Jo Revill and Jamie Doward, ‘BNP backs Hodge in housing row’, Guardian, 27 May 2007.

  31 Heather Stewart, Jessica Elgot and Nazia Parveen, ‘Keir Starmer denies Jeremy Corbyn Labour whip despite end of suspension’, Guardian, 18 November 2020.

  32 On McCluskey, see his Guardian article, ‘I trusted Keir Starmer – until I saw how he handled Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension’, 13 September 2021. On Brown, see Iain Watson, ‘Labour chief whip demands apology from Jeremy Corbyn’, BBC News, 23 November 2020.

  33 See Tom Blackburn, ‘How Keir Starmer Alienated “Generation Left”’, Tribune, 13 March 2021; Nadine White, ‘Thousands back open letter citing BAME voters’ “loss of trust” in Labour Party’, Huffington Post, 5 June 2020.

  34 David Barrett, ‘British Muslims becoming a nation within a nation, Trevor Phillips warns’, Telegraph, 11 April 2016; Trevor Phillips, ‘The decision to put a five-year-old Christian girl into Muslim foster care is like child abuse and the council must pay’, Sun, 31 August 2017; Steve Topple, ‘“Islamophobic” Labour donor deleted his Twitter but forgot about screengrabs’, Canary, 2 December 2020; Aaron Bastani, “It’s Going to Be a Long Night” – How Members of Labour’s Senior Management Team Campaigned to Lose’, Novara Media, 12 April 2020; Ben Quinn, ‘Labour to destroy local election leaflet carrying anti-travellers pledge’, Guardian, 2 April 2021; ‘Over 100 mosques threaten to boycott Labour over Kashmir’, 5 Pillars, 10 May 2020; John Stone, ‘Labour Muslims urge Keir Starmer to take “urgent action” over party official’s “vile Islamophobia” ‘, Independent, 21 June 2021.

  35 Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Keir Starmer, your party has a whole new race problem’, Guardian, 7 July 2021.

  36 Simon Fletcher, ‘Keir Starmer’s Labour Desperately Needs to Stand for Something’, New Statesman, 28 June 2021.

  37 The irony is that, between 2015 and 2019, McDonnell developed mechanisms to embed Labour policymaking in working-class communities. He and Long-Bailey travelled the country, asking thousands of people about the problems they were facing and using their input to draft policy fixes. This was not a mechanical process of measuring and reiterating ‘values’. It was an attempt to adapt party policy to changing material interests, such as the need for universal broadband. Rather than building on this legacy, Starmer’s ‘listening exercises’ have abandoned it in favour of focus-grouping.

  38 Tom Kibasi, ‘Keir Starmer’s leadership needs an urgent course correction’, Guardian, 16 February 2021.

  39 Tom Blackburn, ‘Starmer’s Blairite Bunch’, Tribune, 28 June 2021.

  40 John McDonnell, ‘Keir Starmer’s Labour stands for nothing, so how can we convince people to vote for us?’, i newspaper, 7 May 2021; Tony Blair, ‘Without Total Change Labour Will Die’, New Statesman, 11 May 2021. Well in advance ahead of the election setback, Mandelson was demanding a comprehensive policy review to mark a clean break with the 2019 manifesto: Iain Watson, ‘Mandelson urges Starmer to begin Labour policy review’, BBC News, 21 March 2021.

  41 Keir Starmer, ‘A New Chapter for Britain’, Labour Party, 18 February 2021.

  42 Jonathan Reynolds, ‘Scrap Universal Credit and replace it with a system that offers a safety net for all’, PoliticsHome, 16 September 2020.

  43 George Parker, ‘Starmer urges Labour to embrace Blair’s legacy as he vows to win next election’, Financial Times, 5 August 2021.

  44 Eleanor Langford, ‘Labour says it is “not calling for tax rises” to pay for coronavirus recovery spending after hint at wealth levy’, PoliticsHome, 8 July 2020; Josiah Mortimer, ‘Labour opposes rise in corporation tax in autumn Budget’, Left Foot Forward, 2 September 2020.

  45 Peter Walker, ‘Keir Starmer’s post-Covid plan for Britain – the key points’, Guardian, 18 February 2021.

  46 Tim Shipman and Caroline Wheeler, ‘Fired-up Rachel Reeves takes her axe to Corbyn’s “magic money tree” ‘, Sunday Times, 26 September 2021.

  47 Alejandro Riaño, ‘Why Labour’s “buy British” plan is not going to succeed’, Conversation, 6 July 2021.

  48 Jim Pickard and Daniel Thomas, ‘How Labour’s Starmer and Reeves are “wooing” business chiefs’, Financial Times, 26 November 2021.

  49 Ed McNally, ‘Whose Green New Deal?’, Sidecar, 4 May 2021.

  50 Mary Robertson, ‘Left Economics from Below? Defending the Programme after Corbyn’, New Socialist, 25 August 2020.

  51 Rob Merrick, ‘Climate change: Firms failing to tackle crisis will be delisted from stock exchange, Labour says’, Independent, 19 November 2019.

  52 Chris Saltmarsh, ‘Labour’s Climate Conservatism’, Tribune, 13 January 2021.

  53 Lauren Townsend, ‘Labour’s green recovery plan must reflect the radical vision of party members’, LabourList, 24 August 2020.

  54 Tom D. Rogers, ‘Fact check: Yes, Keir Starmer has broken or rowed back on a large number of his leadership pledges already’, Evolve Politics, 2 November 2020.

  55 ‘Labour’s Green Economic Recovery’, Labour Party, 9 November 2020, 5, 28.

  56 Ibid., 2, 14.

  57 John Pring, ‘Labour says calling for free social care would “just give Tories a stick to beat us with” ‘, Disability News Service, 24 June 2021.

  58 Ibid., 29, 11.

  59 ‘World Cannot Meet Climate Targets Relying on Carbon Capture and Storage’, Global Witness, 11 January 2021.

  60 Angus Satow, ‘Labour backtracks on its green agenda’, Labour Hub, 16 November 2020.

  61 ‘China: Lisa Nandy Excerpts’, 20 July 2020, parallelparliament.co.uk; Michael Savage, ‘Block China’s seat on human rights council over Uighurs, urges Lisa Nandy’, Guardian, 10 October 2020.

  62 Patrick Wintour, ‘China presents itself as rival to democracy and plays UK, says Labour’, Guardian, 19 May 2020.

  63 Ailbhe Rea, ‘Meet the Former Soldier Who’s Changing Britain’s China Policy’, New Statesman, 20 July 2020; David Wilcock, ‘Top Tory China hawk MP Tom Tugendhat says there is a “strong possibility” Covid escaped from a Chinese lab as he says a “culture of fear and silence” around the origins of the pandemic’, Daily Mail, 6 June 2021; Tom Tugendhat, ‘China. The five actions that the government must take to defend our interests’, Conservative Home, 5 June 2020.

  64 See Rea, ‘Meet the Former Soldier Who’s Changing Britain’s China Policy’; Declan McDowell Naylor, ‘UK-China Relations: Labour Need to Communicate a Consistent and Clear Stance toward China, Now’, LSE Blog, 4 June 2020.

  65 Peter Walker, ‘Labour to state “non-negotiable” support for UK’s nuclear weapons’, Guardian, 25 February 2021; ‘Keir Starmer’s Speech to the Fabian Society’s New Year Conference’, Labour Party, 16 January 2021.

  66 John Hudson and Adam Taylor, ‘Pompeo praises Britain for hard line against “disgraceful” China, denies US pressure’, Washington Post, 21 July 2020.

  67 Elliot Chappell, ‘PMQs: “Global Britain” under fire as PM grilled on Yemen humanitarian crisis’, LabourList, 3 March 2021.

  68 ‘Live: Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs amid fallout of Russia report’, youtube.com

  69 Duncan Campbell, ‘How a proposed secrecy law would recast journalism as spying’, Guardian, 20 July 2021; Charles Hymas, ‘New anti-spying laws turn spotlight on academics “working for the enemy” ‘, Telegraph, 13 May 2021.

  70 Matt Honeycombe-Foster, ‘Keir Starmer seeks to rebuild Labour armed forces ties with “ambitious” engagement programme’, PoliticsHome, 27 June 2020; Peter Walker, ‘Labour to state “non-negotiable” support for UK’s nuclear weapons’.

  71 ‘Sir Keir Starmer accuses Boris Johnson of “breaking promise” on army troop numbers’, BBC News, 24 March 2021.

  72 Elliot Chappell, ‘“Spending announcement without a strategy”: Starmer on defence review’, LabourList, 19 November 2020.

  73 Elliot Chappell, ‘Rayner urges Johnson rethink aid cuts to Afghanistan in light of withdrawal’, LabourList, 8 July 2021; Sienna Rodgers, ‘Keir Starmer “deeply concerned” by Joe Biden speech on Afghanistan withdrawal’, LabourList, 17 August 2021.

  74 ‘John Healey Speech at RUSI on Labour’s Core Principles on Defence and Security’, Labour Party, 26 February 2021.

  75 theyworkforyou.com

  76 Greg Heffer, ‘Overseas Operations Bill: Government facing calls to rethink plan to “decriminalise torture” by UK troops’, Sky News, 23 September 2020.

  77 Jon Stone, ‘Keir Starmer sacks Labour MP Nadia Whittome for voting against government “free pass” for torture’, Independent, 25 September 2020.

  78 John Healey, ‘The dishonest Overseas Operations Bill strips British troops of justice’, Guardian, 2 November 2020.

  79 Sienna Rodgers, ‘What can the CHIS vote tell us about Labour under Starmer?’, LabourList, 16 October 2020.

  80 Nigel Morris, ‘Blair’s “frenzied law making”: A new offence for every day spent in office’, Independent, 22 September 2011.

  81 Nigel Nelson, ‘Keir Starmer says Labour will get tough on crime in bid to close Tory poll gap’, Daily Mirror, 3 April 2021.

  82 Heather Stewart, ‘Keir Starmer tells PM to ditch yacht and tackle antisocial behaviour’, Guardian, 24 June 2021.

  83 ‘Shadow Home Secretary Praises “Strong” Federation Links’, Police Federation, 22 September 2020.

  84 ‘Keir Starmer’s Open Letter to the Country: Vote Labour for More Jobs, More Police on the Streets and to Protect Our NHS’, Labour Party, May 2021.

  85 Dan Bloom and Lizzy Buchan, ‘Sarah Everard: Keir Starmer says men must speak out to stop “daily” violence against women’, Daily Mirror, 11 March 2021.

  86 ‘Response to Consultation on Doubling Maximum Sentence for Assaulting Emergency Workers’, Labour Party, 13 July 2020; twitter.com/Keir_Starmer

  87 ‘Letter from Sir David Norgrove to Sir Keir Starmer – Crime Statistics’, UK Statistics Authority, 17 May 2021.

  88 Jon Stone, ‘Labour backs Priti Patel plan to jail protesters for vandalising war memorials’, Independent, 14 June 2020.

  89 ‘Black Lives Matter: Sir Keir Starmer “regrets” calling movement a “moment” ‘, BBC News, 2 July 2020.

  90 Jon Stone, ‘Channel crossings: Keir Starmer faces Labour revolt over stance on refugees’, Independent, 24 August 2020.

  91 Mattha Busby, ‘More than 100 public figures call for halt to Osime Brown deportation’, Guardian, 12 December 2020.

  92 ‘Call Keir: Labour leader Keir Starmer – watch in full’, LBC, 14 December 2020.

  93 ‘Shadow Home Secretary Praises “Strong” Federation Links’.

  94 Hannah Westwater, ‘How Priti Patel’s new policing bill threatens your right to protest’, Big Issue, 7 July 2021.

  95 ‘In pictures: UK police crack down on vigil for Sarah Everard’, Al Jazeera, 14 March 2021.

  96 Elliot Chappell, ‘Labour votes against “draconian” anti-protest bill but it passes by majority of 100’, LabourList, 5 July 2021.

  97 ‘Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer reacts to “Kill the Bill” protests’, youtube.com

  98 See Liza Featherstone, ‘Talk is cheap: The myth of the focus group’, Guardian, 6 February 2018.

  99 See Alan Johnson, ‘Keir Starmer is right to oppose a Tory corporation tax increase’, Guardian, 1 March 2021.

100 Keir Starmer, ‘A New Chapter for Britain’, Labour Party, 18 February 2021.

101 Blair, ‘Without Total Change Labour Will Die’.

102 Keir Starmer, The Road Ahead, Fabian Society, September 2021.

103 yougov.co.uk

104 Ben Walker, ‘Labour Now Leads the Tories in Most Polls – but It Should Avoid Celebration’, New Statesman, 16 November 2021.

Afterword

    1 Mike Wayne, ‘Roadmaps after Corbyn: Parties, Classes, Political Cultures’, New Left Review, September–October 2021, 37.

    2 For a description of Starmer’s bureaucratic assault on the grassroots Left, see Ed McNally, ‘Keir Starmer’s Attacks on Labour’s Left Are a Sign of Weakness, Not Strength’, Jacobin, 26 August 2021.

    3 Iain Watson, ‘Labour losing members hand over fist under Starmer, warns John McDonnell’, BBC News, 18 September 2021; Ailbhe Rea, ‘Diane Abbott: “I Wouldn’t Do to Keir What the Right of the Party Did to Jeremy” ‘, New Statesman, 2 July 2021.

    4 See James Schneider, ‘How We Win: The Party’, Novara Media, 15 March 2021.

Index

Abbott, Diane, 72, 73, 75, 82, 86, 87, 105, 118, 119, 157, 165, 189

Abrahams, David, 165

Acorn, 191

Agrawal, Rajesh, 141

Ahmad, Babar, 31, 32

Ahsan, Talha, 31, 32

Ainsley, Claire, 139, 146–9, 181

Alli, Waheed, 141

Amnesty International, 16, 19, 176

Another Europe Is Possible, 97, 98

Assange, Julian, 33–5, 58

Autonomy, 193

Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, 97

Baldwin, Tom, 94, 95, 97, 111

Barros-Curtis, Alex, 140, 150

Barwell, Gavin, 115–118, 184

BBC, 1, 98, 99, 133, 158

Begum, Apsana, 190

Behr, Rafael, 4

Benn, Hilary, 68, 69, 122, 185

Benn, Tony, 12

Bennett, Natalie, 64

Best for Britain, 97

Black Lives Matter, 179, 192

Blair, Tony, 2, 6, 16, 19, 21, 40, 65, 84, 111, 126, 137, 138, 167–9, 175, 178, 183–5, 192

Blue Labour, 137, 139

Blunkett, David, 167

BNP, 162

Board of Deputies of British Jews, 162, 163

Bowring, Bill, 14

Brexit Party, 119

Bright Blue, 65

British Embassy, 27

Brooks, Rebekah, 56

Brown, Gordon, 6, 21, 23, 63, 65, 77, 95, 126, 137, 167, 169, 183

Brown, Harvie, 47, 48

Brown, Nick, 87, 101, 106, 108, 109, 114, 118, 125, 150, 162–4

Brown, Osime, 179

Brownite Tribune Group, 82

Bruges Group, 111

Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 45

Burgon, Richard, 80, 110, 142, 190

Burnham, Andy, 63–7, 186, 190

Bush, Stephen, 4, 145

Callaghan, James, 10

Cameron, David, 27–9, 49, 50, 53, 54, 57, 59, 66, 67, 69, 70, 147, 183

Campbell, Alan, 164, 165

Campbell, Alastair, 94, 95, 101, 111, 112, 134

Centre for Labour and Social Studies, 110

Chakrabarti, Shami, 87, 105

Chakrabortty, Aditya, 166

Change UK, 95, 113

Chapman, Jenny, 146

Chessum, Michael, 97, 111

China Research Group, 173

Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 173

Chinn, Trevor, 137, 139, 141

Chomsky, Noam, 32

Churchill, Winston, 84

CIA, 36

CLASS, 193

Clegg, Nick, 55, 56

Clegg, Private Lee, 15, 16

Coates, Peter, 141

Collins, Philip, 111

Colston, Edward, 178

Commonwealth, 193

Communication Workers Union, 164

Confederation of British Industry, 78

Conlon, Gerry, 32

Conservative Friends of Israel, 138

Conservative Party, 3, 5, 6, 60, 63, 66, 78, 83, 84, 104, 116, 119, 121, 126, 166, 169, 171, 175, 178, 182–6

Cooper, Yvette, 67, 167

Corbyn, Jeremy, 2, 3, 6, 7, 63–5, 68–77, 79, 80, 82–95, 97, 99, 100, 103–38, 140–2, 144, 149–65, 167, 170, 171, 185, 187–91

Correa, Rafael, 33, 79

Cortes, Manuel, 97, 111

Coulson, Andy, 57

Coveney, Simon, 102

Creasy, Stella, 94

Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), 2, 9, 20–9, 31, 33–5, 37, 40–8, 50–4, 56, 57, 59–62, 140, 144, 166

Cruddas, Jon, 137

Cummings, Dominic, 122, 123

Cunningham, Ian, 43

David, Wayne, 175

Davis, David, 77, 93, 176

Daw QC, Chris, 180

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 84, 87, 101, 102

Dobson, Frank, 62

Dodds, Anneliese, 168, 169

Doughty Street Chambers, 12, 40

Doyle, Matthew, 167

Duggan, Mark, 49

Duncan Smith, Iain, 50, 149

Ecuadorian Embassy, 33, 35

El-Enany, Nadine, 49

Equality and Human Rights Commission, 154

Euratom, 82

Eurojust, 82

European Commission, 81

European Court of Human Rights, 15

European Free Trade Association, 107

European Medicines Agency, 82

European Union (EU), 7, 28, 67, 71, 73, 74, 79–81, 85, 86, 88–94, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 115, 121, 123, 126, 128, 131, 175

Europol, 82

Evans, David, 158, 159, 189

Evans, Sir Jonathan, 35, 36

Everard, Sarah, 178, 180

Extinction Rebellion, 192

Fabian Society, 174, 184

Farage, Nigel, 119

Farron, Tim, 138

FBI, 35

Firle Bonfire Society, 8

Fisher, Andrew, 75, 83, 88, 90–3, 100, 114, 118, 120, 125

Fitzgerald, Edward, 19

Fletcher, Simon, 140, 160, 161

Floyd, George, 153

Formby, Jennie, 151, 154

G20, 38, 47

Gardiner, Barry, 87, 105

Gauke, David, 122

Gibb, Robbie, 118

Gilbert, Jeremy, 129, 132–5

Glasman, Maurice, 137, 139, 143

GMB, 96, 98

Gove, Michael, 50

Graham, Sharon, 191

Greater London Council, 110

Green Party, 11, 64

Greenpeace, 14, 15

Grieve, Dominic, 23–5, 29, 45, 50, 57

Hague, William, 26, 37

Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, 13–15, 17, 58

Hammond, Philip, 115, 122

Hardie, Keir, 9

Harman, Harriet, 63

Harwood, PC Simon, 38, 39

Hatherley, Owen, 136

Hayes, John, 66

Healey, John, 175–7

Hilary, John, 88, 89, 122

Hodge, Dame Margaret, 162, 163

Holder, Eric, 29–35, 57

Hollick, Clive, 141

Home Affairs Select Committee, 29, 151

Hope Not Hate, 97

Howe, Geoffrey, 10

Huhne, Chris, 24

Independent Group, 95

Independent Police Complaints Commission, 43

Institute for Public Policy Research, 110

Institute of Civil Engineers, 81

International Association of Democratic Lawyers, 14

International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, 11

International Workers of Great Britain, 191

IPPR, 140

IRA, 15

ITV, 1

Jackson, Amy, 95, 96, 98–100, 107, 118, 120, 123

James, Daniel, 22

Jewish Labour Movement, 142, 153, 162

Jewish Voice for Labour, 153, 158

Johnson, Boris, 3, 31, 121

Jones, Owen, 85, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135

Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 139

Junior Guildhall School of Music, 10

Kendall, Liz, 137, 138

Kennedy, Mark, 41–3

Kerslake, Bob, 111

Kestenbaum, Jonathan, 141

Khan, Sadiq, 32

Kibasi, Tom, 140, 166

Kinnock, Neil, 12

Kinnock, Stephen, 152, 173, 174

Knowles, Olly, 44

Kuenssberg, Laura, 1

Labor Party (Israel), 153

Labour for a GND, 172

Labour Friends of Israel, 5, 138, 153

Labour Party Young Socialists, 10

Labour Party, 1–3, 5, 6, 11, 60, 62–4, 66–71, 75–91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100–5, 107–9, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119–30, 132–5, 137, 138, 142–4, 148–58, 162, 164–9, 173–8, 180, 182–8, 190, 191, 193, 194

Labour Together, 137–40, 148

Labour Tomorrow, 95, 138

Laclau, Ernesto, 11

Lammy, David, 180

Lavery, Ian, 68, 75, 77, 78, 87, 103, 105, 109, 141, 163, 164, 181, 190

Lawrence, Doreen, 140

Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, 37

LBC, 179

Leslie, Chris, 94, 95

Letwin, Oliver, 122

Liberal Democrats, 23–5, 103, 119, 138

Liberty, 9, 12–14, 66

Lightowlers, Carly, 50

Livni, Tzipi, 37

Loach, Ken, 14

Long-Bailey, Rebecca, 80, 110, 114, 115, 118, 135, 141, 142, 153

LOTO, 66, 69, 72, 75–80, 85–92, 94–7, 99, 104, 106–8, 110–12, 114, 115, 118–26, 132, 144, 146, 148, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 167, 173, 179

Lowles, Nick, 97

Lucas, Caroline, 32

Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 79

Macdonald, Ken, 9, 20, 21, 38, 53, 59, 60

Machover, Moshé, 158

Maguire, Patrick, 2, 94, 95, 99, 147

Mandelson, Peter, 94, 95, 101, 134, 167

Marr, Andrew, 68, 92, 144, 161

Mason, Paul, 111, 128, 130, 133, 135, 139, 148

Matthews, Sam, 154

Mattinson, Deborah, 167

Maurizi, Stefania, 34

May, Theresa, 3, 31, 66, 70, 81, 83, 84, 87, 100, 105

McCluskey, Len, 116, 117, 160, 161, 163

McDonald’s, 14

McDonnell, John, 68, 72, 75, 78, 80, 83, 87, 90, 98, 99, 110–14, 116–21, 123, 129, 130, 132, 134, 141, 157, 158, 160, 167, 169–71, 189

McKinnon, Gary, 30, 31

McKinsey, 140

McNicol, Iain, 154

McSweeney, Morgan, 137, 145, 160

Meadows, Alfie, 48

Menezes, Jean Charles de, 38

Metropolitan Police, 38–40, 49, 52, 56, 57, 180

MI5, 35, 36

MI6, 36

Miliband, David, 11

Miliband, Ed, 6, 24, 62, 63, 138, 167, 183

Miliband, Ralph, 130

Milne, Seumas, 72, 75, 80, 85–6, 88–90, 92, 104, 111, 114–5, 118, 121–4, 129, 155–7, 161, 163–4

Mishcon de Reya, 62

Mohamed, Binyam, 35, 36, 58

Momentum, 6, 74, 83, 97, 154, 192

Morris, David, 14

Mouffe, Chantal, 11

Mubenga, Jimmy, 39

Murdoch, Rupert, 56, 61, 140

Murphy, Karie, 73, 75, 95, 100, 103–4, 110–11, 115–18, 133, 155–7

Murphy, Nicola, 95

Murray, Andrew, 59, 72, 75, 87, 100, 101, 104, 114, 125, 155, 160

Murray, Laura, 71

Myners, Paul, 63

Nairn, Tom, 148

Nandy, Lisa, 135, 137, 139, 152, 153, 173, 186

NATO, 26, 63, 133, 174–6

New Economics Foundation, 110, 193

NHS, 70, 183

Nichols, Charlotte, 165

Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, 17

Northern Irish Policing Board (NIPB), 17–19, 21, 58

Novara Media, 193

Nunn, Ben, 93, 100, 146, 156

Ny, Marianne, 33–5

O’Flynn, Patrick, 2

O’Hagan, Ellie Mae, 43

Obama, Barack, 29

Open Labour, 179

Osborne, George, 55, 59, 183

Ovenden, Paul, 146

Oxford Labour Club, 10

Pabst, Adrian, 139

Paisley Jr, Ian, 18

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 192

Parker, Laura, 97, 111, 139

Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), 66, 68–70, 73, 80, 94, 105–7, 109, 114, 135, 137, 151, 162, 164, 167, 176, 177, 186, 190

Parliamentary Research Service, 95

Patel, Priti, 149, 178, 179

Paul, Nick, 40, 43, 58

Peace and Justice Project, 192

Peach, Blair, 39, 40

Peake, Maxine, 153

People’s Assembly Against Austerity, 110

Peston, Robert, 1

Phillips, Trevor, 165

Phillipson, Bridget, 139

Pogrund, Gabriel, 78, 94, 95, 99, 147

Police Federation, 178

Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), 17, 18

Pompeo, Mike, 174

Powell, Jonathan, 111

Quirk, Hannah, 50

Raab, Dominic, 101

Rawnsley, Andrew, 1

Rayner, Angela, 3, 142, 154, 156–8, 160, 175, 186

Reardon-Bond, Helene, 112, 146

Reclaim the Power, 192

Reed, Jamie, 64

Reed, Steve, 137

Reeves, Rachel, 67, 68, 138, 169, 170

Robbins, Olly, 101, 118

Robertson, Mary, 170

Rose, Christopher, 42, 43, 61

Royal Navy, 179

Royal Ulster Constabulary, 15

Rudd, Roland, 94, 111

RUSI, 175

Russell-Moyle, Lloyd, 152

Rustin, Michael, 12

Rutherford, Jonathan, 139

Salha, Omar, 152

Satow, Angus, 172

Saving Labour, 95, 138

Schneider, James, 74, 75, 82, 86, 89, 91, 92, 107, 115, 123, 124, 155, 156

Schoendorff, Benjamin, 11

Scotland, Patricia, 21

Sedwill, Mark, 26

Sharp, Janis, 30

Simpson, Mark, 75, 90, 93, 95, 140

Sinn Féin, 17, 18

Sisters Uncut, 192

Sky News, 102

Smith, Owen, 70, 71, 74, 87, 137, 138, 140, 190

Snow, Jon, 42

Socialist Campaign Group, 80, 141, 150, 158, 188, 189

Socialist Self-Management, 11

Socialist Society, 12

Society of Labour Lawyers, 14

Soubry, Anna, 85, 113

Space Hijackers, 47

Starmer, Keir, 1–7, 9–82, 84–110, 112, 114, 115, 117–27, 130, 132, 134–48, 150–89

Steel, Helen, 14, 41, 140

Stop the War Coalition, 192

Streeting, Wes, 139, 186

Sultana, Zarah, 190

Sunak, Rishi, 168, 169

Survation, 113

Sypnowich, Christine, 13

Taliban, 175

Tappin, Christopher, 29

Tatchell, Peter, 11

Taylor, Martin, 137, 138, 141

Territorial Army, 173

Thatcher, Margaret, 11, 13, 60, 110, 132, 175

Thornberry, Emily, 54, 64, 86, 87, 103, 106, 119

Todd, Eloise, 97, 111

Tomlinson, Ian, 38, 39

Toynbee, Polly, 1, 63

Trickett, Jon, 72, 75, 79, 80, 87–9, 98, 106, 109, 112, 160–4, 190

Trump, Donald, 174

TSSA, 96–8

Tugendhat, Tom, 173

Twigg, Stephen, 11

UK Statistics Authority, 178

UKIP, 6, 28, 84, 131

Umunna, Chuka, 67, 85, 94, 113

UN, 35, 37, 64, 152, 173

Unite, 116, 160, 191

United Voices of the World, 191

US Department of Justice (DOJ), 29, 34, 57

Wainwright, Hilary, 12

Wallis, Neil, 56

War on Want, 88, 192

Ward, Chris, 95, 145

Ward, Dave, 164, 165

Watson, Tom, 67, 69, 87, 94, 138

Wayne, Mike, 187, 188

We Own It, 192

White, Sam, 167

WikiLeaks, 33

Wimborne-Idrissi, Naomi, 158

Winterton, Rosie, 68

Women Against Rape, 45, 46

World Trade Organization, 88, 170

The World Transformed, 193

Yates, John, 56, 57

YouGov, 131