It’s absurd to suggest that the words “Keir Starmer” and “sexy” don’t belong in the same sentence. (And not just because that last sentence proves the thesis wrong.) People had the same problem with Gordon Brown until 2007, when the ostensibly dour man destined to replace Tony Blair as prime minster was voted the world’s 97th sexiest man by New Woman magazine.
Forget Labour’s 24-point poll lead over the Tories: it’s the sexiness rankings Starmer’s minders need to focus on if Rishi Sunak is to be reduced to a sobbing wreck on election night.
A poll commissioned for this review suggests that, were the same survey conducted today, Starmer would come in at least 96th, certainly well above Jacob Rees-Mogg. Which isn’t saying much, but after 14 years in opposition, Labour will take its wins wherever it can find them.
Sexy? Really? Consider the footage with which political journalist Anushka Asthana starts this profile of the Labour leader based on three months’ worth of interviews. It’s last year’s party conference and Starmer has just seen off the protester who sprinkled him with glitter. John Prescott would have lamped the interloper, but Starmer keeps his composure, runs fingers through his enviable quiff and presses on as if he were Don Draper with more Brylcreem and better legal training. Was it just me who came over all unnecessary when he rolled up his shirt sleeves and started telling the faithful about his vision of a prudent, measured Britain in prudent, measured sentences? Of course it wasn’t. Ladies and gents, start your engines: Keir Starmer is ready for office.
Or maybe not. Asthana sets up a focus group of voters who elected Boris Johnson in 2019. She asks them to come up with one word that characterises the current Labour leader. “Trustworthy,” says one. “Weak,” says another. “Nothingness,” adds a possibly French existentialist. “I couldn’t sit in a pub with Starmer. I just find him too boring,” says one former Tory. Presumably this respondent would be happy to have a drink with a lying, adulterous, narcissistic man baby who can’t get his hair still less his WhatsApp messages straight? With all due respect, mate, you’re voting for a party leader who can sort out the NHS and the cost of living crisis, not a drinking buddy.
And yet, for poor old Starmer, the boring tag just won’t go away. He doesn’t make matters easy for himself, though. Asthana interviews Starmer as he walks down the Hornsey Road to see his favourite football team on match day. What is that team again? The team nicknamed “boring, boring Arsenal” for its parsimonious defence and problematic attitude to putting the ball in the net. If Starmer was really serious about not being boring, he should support a team with a bit of devilry about them. Worse yet, when Asthana asks about the parallels between football and politics, Starmer ups the boring ante: “It’s very binary and all about winning.” Good grief, man, fire your speechwriter.
Do you think it matters that people don’t want to have a pint with you, Asthana asks Starmer? “I want to have a pint with them,” he says oddly, perhaps having fired his speechwriter already. What, all of them? “At the moment, people are saying to me we want change. They aren’t saying can you entertain. Tell me a joke.” It’s a fair point: we tried charismatic idiocy three times since oleaginous Etonian David Cameron muffed up Britain, and what good did that do us? The question was rhetorical.
But isn’t Starmer a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in something sensible and beige? Contrast the Labour leader with his undeniably charismatic deputy. Angela Rayner described herself as oversharing, Asthana tells Starmer, and you as undersharing. “I think Angela’s spot on with that. I think I do undershare.” Why? “We were quite a private working-class family. Dad worked in a factory, my mum was a nurse and my mum was very, very ill. She had Still disease, which is an aggressive juvenile arthritis. She was constantly being told ‘you’re never going to walk again.’ It was quite intense, but intensely private.” He doesn’t think he would even broach this subject publicly were his parents still alive. His dad, he tells Asthana, was distant, putting all his emotional energies into caring for his wife.
How lovely to hear someone in our age of oversharing know where the line lies between private life and none of your bloody business. (While, ironically enough, sharing to a reporter details about his private life.)
Could Starmer emulate Blair? The architect of Blair’s New Labour victory in 1997, Peter Mandelson, tells Asthana: “Do I think he’s got it? Yes I do.” What Mandelson probably means by “it” is “a strong chance of relocating to 10 Downing Street later this year”. But there is a problem. Not RMT general secretary Mick Lynch’s jibe that Starmer needs to prove he isn’t a Tory in a different coloured rosette, but something chilling the Labour leader’s daughter told her dad. If he does win the election, she isn’t moving to Downing Street. She’s staying in Kentish Town with her mates.
What if he loses? Starmer tells Asthana he has already planned his post-political career – working in that lovely independent bookshop on Kentish Town Road. His daughter, you’d think, would like that. The rest of us? Not so much.
• This article was amended on 19 January 2024. New Woman magazine listed Gordon Brown as the world’s 97th sexiest man in 2007, not 1997 as an earlier version said.
Keir Starmer: Up Close is on ITV now.
