Red Knight: The Unauthorised Biography of Sir Keir Starmer

Product Information

What we see - again as the author is clear and determined to show - is a man who will change direction, adopt distinct strategies and manage messages exceptionally well to get reach his aim. Interesting to me was that Eagleton, although hostile, remains strenuously balanced and forensic - he disagrees with or moderates some of the more aggressive online attack-lines on Starmer (the Saville case is not mentioned, for instance).

In these pages, the man comes across quite clearly as an authoritarian interested in power and fearful of decisions. Oliver Eagleton quite rightly cites Brexit as the main reason Corbyn's Labour was so soundly beaten. The ambitious shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, is working on a memoir of his humble childhood in the East End of London. Alfie Meadows was assaulted by a police officer to the extent that he had to undergo emergency brain surgery – Starmer prosecuted him three times.

In these pages we see how Labour Together selected Keir Starmer to be its frontman, helping him win Labour's leadership with the most mendacious campaign in recent political history. Starmer was the architect of Labour’s second-referendum Brexit policy, which was considered a major factor in its worst electoral defeat for nearly a century.

The book tracks Starmer’s emergence from a troubled small town background and rebellious youth, through a storied legal career as a human rights barrister and the country’s chief prosecutor, to becoming an MP relatively late in life. So little remains known about Starmer that his actions are usually interpreted as overtures to others. He co-founded Doughty Street Chambers in 1990, and conducted cases in a range of international courts, including the European Court of Human Rights.I was in Kier Starmer's leadership campaign video (for which I was well roasted by my friends), because it looked good for him to be on the campaign trail standing next to a black guy. Prior to this he showed his authoritarian instincts while prosecuting peaceful demonstrators at the 2009 G20 in London. The first unauthorised biography of Keir Starmer by a former Financial Times journalist who went to the same school as the Labour Leader of the Opposition. Mid-way through the book Ashcroft reveals that Starmer is a member of the secretive anti-democratic Trilaterals.

An aide who worked closely with Starmer between 2016 and 2019 reflected that this was ‘typical of Keir.This chapter provided good insight into how Starmer operates and in which groups he worked and with whom; notably as Corbyn's Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and thus played a central role in Labour's posture and importantly, within this book, its public statements and his going against the party line and explicit briefings from Corbyn and LOTO's office.

He worked at the human rights charity Liberty which subsequently grew to larger prominence under Shami Chakrabarti.I knew most of this already, because I played a peripheral part in some of what is described in this book. Whilst Starmer and his Progress chums thought they were playing a blinder, the electorate saw them, and alas the Labour Party, as effectively not knowing whether to shit or get off the pot as far as Brexit was concerned. Oliver Eagleton says it was a deliberate ploy by Starmer, arguing that either way he would come out on top. I was led to seeing parallels with the current Conservative party (those in Government at the time of writing), where a break-away group, possibly with Johnson, Patel and others, possibly including Nigel Farage, created a new right-wing party. He asserted that the ‘independent’ Rose report had refuted accusations of a systemic problem with spycops, when in fact it was a patent whitewash.