Sir Keir Starmer: bureaucrat first, politician second

OXFORD, 1986. The editorial board of Socialist Alternatives, a tiny magazine that follows the revolutionary ideas of Michel Pablo, an obscure Greek Trotskyist, meets under the guidance of a willowy figure known as “the Frenchman”. Its members include a law student called Keir Starmer. His articles are hard to decipher; his main contribution is to take the magazine to the printers and distribute it to bookshops. “Keir was the backroom guy, the one who did the hard work,” a comrade tells Tom Baldwin, author of a penetrating new biography of the Labour Party’s leader (these days, Sir Keir). “The rest sat around and talked.”