Whatever your politics, you have to recognise that Keir Starmer’s premiership raises not only political issues but professional ones. He is so quintessentially a lawyer. He presents himself as such—not so much consciously but in his whole demeanour. And he seems a real, deep-down lawyer. Not someone like Tony Blair who added a barrister’s experience as just one layer of his personal development.
I am peculiarly sensitive to the prime minister’s character because I spent six weeks canvassing in the election—for the first time in my life. This was in the constituency of Islington North, where the opposition was not from the Greens, Lib Dems, Reform or Tories. We saw nothing of them. We were up against Keir’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party—Jeremy Corbyn.
If challenged on the doorstep, the canvasser is put in the position of defending the leader’s position. By the end, I had a pretty fluent articulation of policy on Gaza and the NHS. These were the two hot
