After ditching the £28bn price-tag on his green prosperity plan, then ditching his Rochdale by-election candidate, February was a tough month for Keir Starmer. Catastrophe? No – but a bad series of jolts. Meanwhile, as he circulated and gladhanded with foreign leaders at the Munich Security Conference, you could see him almost beginning to accept the notion that this is real – that he will become prime minister, and all that makes the question of his political personality an ever-more urgent one. It may be the biggest in British politics right now: who is he? Where is his core?
Difficult questions: how does anyone who doesn’t know him already go deeper than the slightly awkward public persona, the stiffly disciplined hair and the furrowed brow, the focus group-tested phrases? Starmer is not a natural exhibitionist. Over the course of this year we will hear, from discredited right and hard left, the case for the prosecution – that this is a politically empty, indecisive man, controlled by others. Piffle, I think; and here, in Tom Baldwin’s Keir Starmer: The Biography, the first detailed study, is the case for the defence.
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