SIR KEIR STARMER, Prime Minister, MP, leader of the Labour Party, king’s counsel, former director of public prosecutions and former human rights lawyer, plainly has a curriculum vitae of sorts, with a touch of glitter and grandeur about it.

But is his word to be trusted? Would you buy a used car (or even a new one) from this man?  

On April 4 2021, veteran Guardian correspondent Polly Toynbee praised him as “a trusted, tried and tested, big-brained grown-up.”

Less admiring, Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project (2022) concluded: “Working hand-in-glove with the security services, the DPP [ie Starmer] lost whatever progressive instincts he once had, especially where foreign policy or civil liberties were concerned.”  

“He acted as a Cameron-Osborne mouthpiece on issues from welfare entitlements to public order.” “As party leader” [his position] “meant supporting Tory policies in principle but querying their means of implementation.”

One crude measure of public support for a politician is his or her personal level of electoral success. When first elected as Labour MP for Holborn & St Pancras in the general election of May 2015, over 29,000 people voted for him — nearly 53 per cent of the turnout.

The maintenance of a Conservative majority in that election had undoubtedly benefited from prime minister David Cameron’s promise of a public referendum as to whether Britain should stay in the European Union or leave, but Cameron’s tactic proved to be ill-considered, for his own Remain preference was to be dashed by a 52 per cent Leave vote on June 24 2016.

Successor in Downing Street to the unfortunate Cameron was Theresa May, who then perpetrated her own folly by calling another general election on June 8 2017 with a view to bolstering the Tory Commons majority. The outcome was the disappearance of that majority and a much stronger Labour presence on the basis of progressive policies pursued under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer’s constituency general election support had leaped to 41,343.  

Thereafter, his shadow ministerial role had its own unofficial shadow support from the “political think tank,” Labour Together, headed by Morgan McSweeney (now Starmer’s besieged chief of staff) and into which private donor funding was to pour. More about this later.  

Unpleasing electoral news for Starmer was to come. In the December 2019 general election, following May’s replacement at No 10 by “Get Brexit Done” Boris Johnson, support for Labour, connected to its position over future relations with the EU, fell precipitously (causing Corbyn’s resignation as leader). Starmer’s personal vote fell to 36,641. Four years later, on July 4 2024, it dropped dramatically from that height by almost a half to 18,884.

Back to 2020. On April 4 Starmer scooped the leadership election from his main challenger, Rebecca Long Bailey, who had been a close supporter of Corbynist policies. His own campaign had been launched just three months earlier. In the Sunday Mirror on January 5 he declared: “We must not lose sight of our values, or retreat from the radicalism of the past few years.”

On the 12th, at a Manchester campaign event, he was more cautious than that declaration would imply. While favouring the return of the railways into public ownership, he withheld commitment to cancelling privatisations of energy, water and postal services.

But Long Bailey was ahead of him, calling at the end of January for the renationalisation of these industries. Starmer promptly took the same line. Not desiring to be an opposition emperor with no, or insufficient, clothes, he chose to steal some from his rival.

In the second week of February 2020 he signed and circulated 10 “pledges,” founded on “the moral case for socialism.” These, he said, had the objective of advancing “the interests of the people our party was created to serve.”

The first five, being more precisely formulated than the rest on the whole, are restated here. His first pledge, addressing “Economic Justice,” was: “Increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.”

His second, addressing “Social Justice,” was: “Abolish universal credit and the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime. Set a national goal for wellbeing to make health as important as GDP; invest in services that help shift to a preventative approach. Stand up for universal services and defend our NHS. Support for the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.”

Third on his list was “Climate Justice”: “Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.”

Fourth down was his promise: “Promote peace and human rights.”  This entailed: “No more illegal wars, introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights right at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.”

Starmer’s fifth pledge was for “Common ownership”: “Public services should be in public hands, not making profit for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing our NHS, local government and justice system.”

From the rest of the pledges, two explicit samples were: “Repeal the Trade Union Act” and “Abolish the House of Lords — replace it with an elected chamber…”

If part of the above fourth pledge (“No more illegal wars”) was to be interpreted as implying a foreign policy more independent of the United States, it was weakly expressed. Equally weak, perhaps, was Starmer’s insistence to Andrew Marr in a TV interview that February that his intended legislation would bar military action unless there was a lawful case for it, there was a viable objective, and if the consent of the House of Commons was given.  

But the framework of home policy plans was more robust, and Starmer’s pledge to nationalise energy, rail and the Royal Mail, and to embody it within the Labour general election manifesto in 2024 was confirmed in Starmer’s TV interview with Andrew Neil in March 2020.

So it was that Starmer, benefiting much from a political stance belonging to Labour at the 2017 general election, took the party’s leadership with 275,780 votes — more than 56 per cent.

As leader Starmer was soon to ditch his “pledges” as if they were no more than idle passing thoughts. Among other back-offs, he abandoned his promises to increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, to reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax, to do away with university tuition fees, and to renationalise mail, water and energy.

Asked in July 2022 on BBC Radio 4 if these promises were “dead in the water,” Starmer replied with a “Yes,” adding, unconvincingly: “The financial situation has changed, the debt situation has changed.”

Cushioned by a large parliamentary majority from the 2024 general election, though not by recent public polling statistics, Starmer carries on the doomsday Tory solution of economic austerity, with increased public expenditure banned “in the name of fiscal discipline,” a mantra parroted endlessly by his Chancellor of Exchequer while serious recession threatens.

In his just published book, The Fraud, Paul Holden (an established investigator of large misdeeds — notably in South African affairs, supported by judicial findings), dives deeply into the Starmer project. His preface states that on the basis of substantial leaked Labour Party documentation, he can “plausibly argue that Morgan McSweeney may have purposefully broken the law when he failed to report hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Electoral Commission as required by statute between 2018 and 2020,” and that “McSweeney then used those undisclosed funds to propel Sir Keir Stamer to the leadership…” He adds: “Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that the political project that delivered us a Starmer government has been a reckless and arguably lawless endeavour whose misconduct threatens the health of British democracy.”

Thus Holden throws down his own gauntlet to the knight without armour or principles and his shadowy agent. Outcomes awaited.