Sir Keir Starmer is a Prime Minister In Waiting.
The job is not in the bag unless and until the votes have been cast in Labour‘s favour – as he and his close advisers are the first to point out.
But all the circumstantial evidence from elections and opinion polls suggests that Starmer is far and away the person most likely to be the occupant of 10 Downing Street after the general election due in the next 11 months.
PMIW is not a status conferred on all opposition leaders. Interest only peaks when a change of government is in the air. Scrutiny turns from the struggling incumbent prime minister to new hope.
Tony Blair, before 1997, and David Cameron, before 2010, both basked in the attention.
Starmer is less comfortable in the spotlight. Yet, in spite of his reticence, at the equivalent stage in his pursuit of power he is more of an odds-on favourite to take over the government than Blair or Cameron ever were.
So, who is Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s likely next prime minister? A flurry of interviews and profiles are all part of the full PMIW treatment, topped off by a campaign biography of the candidate.
On cue, Keir Starmer: The Biography is published next week. The blurb insists the book is “authoritative – not authorised”, but it is based on “many hours of interviews” with Sir Keir, his family, friends and close colleagues.
The original plan was for Tom Baldwin, a Times journalist turned spokesman for then Labour leader Ed Miliband, to ghost write a Starmer autobiography. With typical modesty, Starmer abandoned that idea and decided to leave Baldwin to produce his own sympathetic portrait independently.
The book was “written”, Baldwin says, “with the respect a serious grown-up leader deserves”.
A lot changes when a political leader becomes a PMIW. At the recent Munich Defence Conference, the diaries of foreign…
