Keir Starmer will be a better Labour prime minister than he is leader of the opposition

The fracas over the Commons’ Gaza ceasefire vote was a useful lesson to the PM-in-waiting of how brutal politics can be, and that it is lonely at the top. But, says Andrew Grice, Starmer has actually emerged from it all in a stronger position

Keir Starmer ‘can look a bit boring – but so did Clement Attlee’ (PA Wire)

Keir Starmer dodged a bullet by avoiding the biggest Labour rebellion of his leadership and more frontbench resignations. Although he emerged as the winner from the Commons chaos and procedural fiddling while Gaza burned, the Labour leader has lessons to learn from a week that damaged our political class.

Starmer denied threatening Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, with the prospect of losing his job if he did not call Labour’s amendment on a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel. If Hoyle had not broken with precedent to do so, up to 100 Labour MPs might have voted for the Scottish National Party’s more strongly worded motion. But Labour’s denials do not rule out the possibility that one or more Labour figures outside of Starmer’s office reminded the speaker that he would need the votes of the party’s MPs to be re-elected after the general election.

Tom Baldwin, author of the revealing Keir Starmer: The Biography, which was published this week, notes that the highly sensitive Gaza issue has forced Starmer to spend more time talking to his MPs. “He had often been told by staff he needed to do more of such meetings, but they aren’t the kind he much enjoys,” Baldwin writes. Starmer had better get used to it: he will need his MPs’ support if he becomes prime minister.

Despite his reprieve, there is plenty of internal flak flying in Starmer’s direction over the Gaza vote. Some senior Labour figures admit privately that the leadership would have been better off announcing the significant change of policy – in support of “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire” – on its own terms rather than being bounced into it by the SNP. Some Labour frontbenchers complain they are being marginalised by Starmer’s all-powerful office.

Such gripes are commonplace in politics. So is Starmer’s discovery that it is lonely at the top. It will get even lonelier if he makes it to Downing Street.

He has never been part of any Labour faction, and Baldwin reveals that some close allies fear that could leave him dangerously isolated in No 10.

Chris Ward, formerly a long-standing aide, says his “biggest fear” is that Starmer “ultimately ends up trapped by one faction or becomes isolated when the going gets tough”. It will: running a government is even more messy than this week’s shenanigans. Labour’s economic inheritance would be dire. Then there are the unexpected events – I suspect in foreign affairs, whether or not Donald Trump is in the White House.

Baldwin’s very readable biography answers the “Who is Keir Starmer?” question far better than anyone else has done. The former Labour communications director, sympathetic but not uncritical, enjoyed a lot of access to Starmer and became convinced that he has the word “integrity” running through him as though he were a stick of rock.

But as I read the book, I wondered how Baldwin would reconcile that with the Conservatives’ most potent attack line – that Starmer is a flip-flopper? This is the heart of it, because it matters to voters: if he could run on one prospectus and then govern Labour on another, might he do the same to the country?

The author’s answer is that Starmer believes in pragmatism and “getting things done” rather than ideology or the sort of “vision” commentators like me demand. He argues that the Labour leader’s painstaking, building-block approach might mean he changes his mind, but that the end result could be more solid – and that his lack of a link to any one faction could prove a strength.

The inscrutable Starmer doesn’t like doing the personal stuff, but there is lots of it in this book – notably about his genuinely working-class background, putting to bed the idea that it is a made-up backstory. His family story is moving. His mother’s illness and his difficult relationship with a distant father convinced Baldwin that his subject was “exceptionally normal”.

But Starmer is definitely not a normal politician. Unusually for one who has risen so high up the political ladder, he has few real friends in politics: he is loyal to those from his school and university days. He escapes from the political world as quickly as he can to return to his roots in his “football, friends and family”. His friends don’t recognise him when they see his stiff, buttoned-up performances before the TV cameras.

His childhood left Starmer no time to emote, and he didn’t need to as a human rights lawyer or director of public prosecutions. Revealingly, he opened up to Baldwin because he realised his reticence was a barrier to what always comes first for him – winning.

True, Starmer can look a bit boring. But so did Clement Attlee. He, too, lacked charisma and was constantly underestimated, yet he led Labour’s transformative post-war government. Baldwin’s book reinforces my view that Starmer would prove a better prime minister than leader of the opposition. And, as his party’s opinion-poll lead and his escape from the parliamentary maze show, he is hardly doing a bad job in his current post.