When England kick off their Euro 2024 campaign against Serbia on Sunday night and most of this nation’s attention is fixed far from politics, Keir Starmer will be watching the football and drinking beer in a London pub.
Although not an official media event, it’s a fair bet that someone will post a photograph of him doing so. And jaundiced observers might reasonably conclude this is merely part of the Labour leader’s own quest for victory in a campaign where he’s trying to say, according to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “Look at me, ‘I’m a man of the people.’”
After all, this is a politician whose first appearance in this election was at Gillingham’s football ground. Fresh from his manifesto launch on Thursday, he travelled to Crewe’s Gresty Road to greet supporters gathered in red seats. Before the evening was over, he had stopped off at Halesowen Town FC for a raucous little rally in this non-league club’s bar.
Starmer didn’t have time for a scheduled stop at Reading’s grimly named Select Car Leasing Stadium that day, but he has squeezed in events at other clubs including Worcester City and Stafford Rangers. Since becoming leader, he’s been to Accrington Stanley, Carlisle United, Glasgow Perthshire, Ilkeston Town, Norwich City, Port Vale, Stevenage, Swansea City, Walsall and Wycombe Wanderers, as well as perhaps a dozen Premier League grounds following his team, Arsenal.
On Wednesday, as he stepped off the pitch at yet another smaller stadium, Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park, I asked him if he was trying to do all 92 league grounds before polling day. “We’re certainly clocking them up,” he replied, inclining his head into a grin.
Starmer isn’t the only leader to use football in this way. Clubs are among the most loved and recognisable features of the marginal seat battleground. They are also protected by locked gates that prevent the “unscripted” encounter with an angry voter that campaign planners fear most.
Even so, proper fans are ever on the alert for any kind of fakery. Tony Blair was accused, unfairly as it turned out, of exaggerating his boyhood bond with Newcastle United. David Cameron was ridiculed when, having spent years professing his undying love for Aston Villa, he told a rally that he supported West Ham. And though Rishi Sunak is, by all accounts, a genuine Southampton fan, the derision that greeted his effort to dribble a ball around cones at Chesham United at the start of this campaign showed he’s not much of a footballer himself.
Starmer, by contrast, not only knows about but also still plays the sport with a degree of obsessiveness recognisable to others with the bug.
Before the eight-a-side games he arranges in Kentish Town, the Labour leader can usually be seen outside the changing rooms, pacing up and down, impatiently awaiting late arrivals.
As a season-ticket holder at Arsenal, he says his daughter “takes the piss” out of his muttering instructions or making diagonal hand-slice gestures indicating where players should pass. “They can’t see you,” she points out.
Football has always normalised what isn’t quite normal for Starmer. When he was young, his overbearing father would not allow him to watch TV, so he would avoid school playground conversations about what had been on the night before by kicking a ball around instead.
As a tightly bound adult, he has found release in the collective rush of joy that greets a last-minute winner when, he says: “Everyone stands up, hands in the air, like there’s a giant magnet in the sky.”
But more than this, Starmer reaches for football to both explain and root what he calls the “weird life I have now”. There is even a whole section in my biography of him called “footballism”, even though he generally eschews “isms” of other kinds.
He instinctively uses football cliches like “I do my talking on the pitch” as metaphors for politics. He also sought advice from coaches including Arsène Wenger and Gareth Southgate on how to manage a team. “What I noticed about Southgate,” he told me, “is that he listens. He’s not trying to dominate the whole room.”
At Grimsby Town last week, it was Starmer himself who listened intently and made notes when he met a group of community leaders who have formed a partnership with the club to improve housing and youth clubs in the town. When told by a young woman that politics just seemed “like a game”, he agreed, saying that outside political parties “most people don’t really care how you vote, they just want to get on with making things work better”.
The club’s vice chairman, Jason Stockwood, said politicians “pulling football shirts over their office attire or trying to dribble footballs badly to show they are in touch” would not cut it with people in this town. And Starmer seemed to take heed, keeping the Grimsbybobble hat he had been given, as once modelled by Boris Johnson, firmly in its bag.
As such, much of his “footballism” is more relevant to the way he would govern than it is to the question of whether he will win the election. Lots of voters don’t like football and there are some, of course, who would rather be anywhere else than watching it in a pub with middle-aged men like Starmer.
But this is an election where much of the media appears very excited about the “ordinary bloke” popular touch of Nigel Farage, who has built a brand out of being a bit of a pub bore himself. Although he claims to have been a Crystal Palace fan in his youth, there’s no evidence he goes to games and his pronouncements on football are largely about criticising alleged wokery, such as England players taking the knee or a team kit based on the “reimagined” St George’s Cross.
Starmer is counting that most “ordinary blokes” – and “ordinary women” – will have better things to do than engage with such culture-war trivia. Like him, they may just prefer to watch the match tonight.
Keir Starmer: The Biography, by Tom Baldwin, is published by William Collins
