What drives Keir Starmer?

“Yes, but how does it feed into the national grid?” Keir Starmer was visiting a wind farm in the months leading up to the general election and was desperate to discover how Labour could overcome planning restrictions to drive green energy supply. Suddenly, he was penning a diagram of how he envisaged it working. An aide was struck by how “He was consciously imitating his tool-maker father, who’d draw diagrams to find his way round obstacles and solve problems.”

None of the six previous Labour PMs thought in this same hands-on way, and it tells us much about Starmer and how he approaches the job. It equipped him well for driving Labour to power in league with Morgan McSweeney, his key campaigning strategist. But it has translated far less well into Downing Street, where altogether different skills are required. Most of the blunders have occurred because he didn’t know what he didn’t know, and neither did McSweeney. Neither asked the right people eager to tell them.

It’s not too late to learn from his predecessors as Labour PMs, who built on the party’s exuberantly bearded and passionately socialist first leader after whom Starmer was named, Keir Hardie. 

Ramsay MacDonald clashed with Hardie by insisting Labour become a parliamentary, legal and patriotic party, anticipating in significant ways Starmer’s later battles with Jeremy Corbyn. MacDonald prevailed, leading the party into government, with some notable successes in 1924, especially in housing reform, but split the party in 1931. From Clement Attlee, Labour’s most effective and socialist PM who achieved the party’s first parliamentary majority with the 1945 landslide, Starmer could learn that Labour leaders need neither charisma nor great oratory skills to succeed. 

Harold Wilson had a clear vision when he returned the party to power in 1964—to modernise Britain, not least through economic, technological and scientific reform. But even after his landslide win in the 1966 general election, that strategic purpose was sacrificed to tactical management of his fractious party. “Harold was a lover of the political game. He was an outsider and was never at ease in the smart metropolitan world of London dinner parties,” says Nick Thomas-Symonds, Wilson’s biographer. Starmer, too, would sooner be with mates in a pub or on the football pitch than attending smart London soirées. 

Labour’s fourth PM James Callaghan, who succeeded Wilson in 1976, was surprised when his biographer and doyen of Labour party history Kenneth O Morgan asked him, “Are you a socialist, Jim?” The very notion seemed absurd to Callaghan. “Jim viewed the country as like a big trade union gathering, and conversations as essentially an exercise in collective bargaining,” says Morgan. Like Starmer, Callaghan was essentially transactional and unideological, with a mission to improve the lives of working people. What both Callaghan and Attlee had though, as well as being a shade older than Starmer's 61 years when they came to power, was bountiful experience of high ministerial office. That's why he needs to listen more to those who know how it works.

Suave and omnicompetent Tony Blair is on the surface a totally different animal to the atheistic and reserved Starmer. Blair had the unique benefit of two landslide victories, with 43.2 per cent of the popular vote in 1997 and 40.7 per cent in 2001, in contrast to Starmer’s 33.7 per cent in 2024. But in their cores both leaders are more similar than they might acknowledge. Profoundly shaped by their parents and family, both are mission rather than ideologically driven. Both men are profoundly absorbed too, as historian-cum-Number 10 aide John Bew attests, by Britain’s position in the world. Starmer’s strong stand on how Europe should respond to Donald Trump’s provocations on Ukraine shows what he can do. 

With Gordon Brown, Starmer shares moral seriousness and purpose, acquired in the former’s case in the manse of his Church of Scotland father. Brown, though, was an avid reader of history and had a mastery of economics. Starmer has neither. Brown understood intrinsically the importance of growth, and his greatest achievement was to preside over a uniquely long 11-year period of Labour inspiring confidence in its command of the economy, from 1997 to 2008. 

Starmer stands out as Labour’s most pragmatic prime minister. “He”s always much keener to work out how to make something work than to work out why,” says one of his ministers. So what forged him? Neither Marx nor economist Marianna Mazzucato, neither reading nor religion, nor indeed thinktanks or theory in any shape or form. A succession of those close to him to whom I spoke testify to his upbringing: family, family, family. “His beliefs in respect for working people and in their dignity are deeply rooted in his family,” said one. “His father being patronised for being a tool maker, his mother’s chronic Still’s disease, his sister’s challenges as a social worker, his brother’s learning difficulties, all impinged deeply on Keir. As PM, he wants to make life a little easier for people like his family,” said another. “His father always made it clear that just because he achieved more in the world than his brother professionally it didn’t mean that his brother was any less a human being,” said a third. All this is admirable in a prime minister. Necessary indeed, after the frivolous leadership of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. But it is not sufficient.

First up, Starmer needs to sort out his team. He is not good at team-building, either in cabinet or Downing Street. He has much to learn still about delegation and trusting others to get on with their job. “Bringing about change will be my biggest preoccupation if we win power,” he told former home secretary Charles Clarke before the general election. “So it was surprising [for Starmer] to be so unprepared for power when he moved into Number 10, and not to have appointed his cabinet secretary until five months in,” Clarke adds. Blame is heaped from all sides unfairly on Sue Gray, the former civil servant Starmer appointed as his chief of staff in 2023. But the prime minister alone was to blame for appointing and then not protecting her, and for not listening to wise heads on an area—how to operate as PM—in which he is so inexperienced. The delayed appointment in late 2024 of two of Blair’s Downing Street team, Jonathan Powell and Liz Lloyd, was positive but he has much further to go to make Number 10 the powerhouse it needs to be. The best prime ministers remain on the bridge, guiding their ships forward, leaving their team to sort out the brawls below. Without a strong engine room, nothing will be achieved. 

Second, every successful PM is a storyteller, weaving an optimistic narrative about where they are leading the country and why they uniquely are the right choice as leader. Starmer may be alone among his team in not having read Bew’s Attlee biography, which shows how his subject crafted the arc of his leadership. But he should have clocked FD Roosevelt’s inaugural address in March 1933. Like Starmer, the president had been vague in his own election campaign, but he then exuded massive optimism and positivity once in power. Starmer has turned on these taps since Christmas: but the trickle needs to become a torrent. 

Finally, delivering growth. He and Rachel Reeves let themselves be hexed, post the Truss mini budget, by fear of the markets viewing them as imprudent financially. But one area above all will decide the historical verdict on him: can he stimulate growth, from which everything else flows? Without it, and in abundance, he’ll not be able to achieve better public services and a fairer, greener country. Few of his six Labour predecessors as PM enjoyed such close and trusting relationships with their chancellors. Number 10 and the Treasury need in the next four years to become an engine house of growth. Few of his ministers have experience of business and finance, so he needs to lean on figures who know how to achieve growth, like ex Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane and GSK’s Emma Walmsley. Reeves is listening more to wealth creators, but he is still too attached to tribal party figures and not enough to business voices who will have far more impact on whether he wins the general election in 2029 than his election geeks. 

All of which points the finger at McSweeney, who is well portrayed in the recent Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund book, but is addicted to campaigning and insufficiently devoted to governing. Starmer needs to hire a top-rank permanent secretary at Number 10 and to lean on figures who will show him how to drive policy in Whitehall, and how to bring about the urgently needed modernisation in the civil service. Redeploying McSweeney may be inevitable for this pivot to a governing rather than a campaigning prime minister.

Like Attlee, he can be tough: “Keir can be utterly ruthless when he thinks the occasion requires it, tackling antisemitism in the party, or replacing Anneliese Dodds with Rachel Reeves in May 2021,” says the economist Will Hutton. “But it is a ruthlessness driven by the exigencies of circumstance rather than by temperament.” Like Attlee—as Peter Hyman, a former adviser to both Blair and Starmer, observes—he has an equable core: “Nothing seems to faze him. He can withstand huge pressure.” Moving McSweeney sideways to a better suited role would be easily in his grasp.

Starmer at best can outperform all his predecessors bar Attlee. Or, like MacDonald, Wilson, Callaghan and Brown, his premiership could be characterised by economic troubles. He may not heed much party history. But as a former schoolboy 1st XI captain, he can learn from his beloved Arsenal's legendary manager, Arsène Wenger, who meticulously planned each season, and five years ahead. Wenger was renowned for nurturing young talent, Starmer has overseen the arrival of over 100 capable new MPs. He mustn’t make the mistake Wenger did of staying in the job too long, but could quit in the early 2030s having won a second general election victory. Let’s not pretend, though, it will be easy: he lacks Attlee’s clear roadmap, Wilson’s popular zeitgeist and the strong economy enjoyed by Blair throughout his time in office. But it would be wrong to think that this unusually apolitical PM won’t yet come up with a diagram for seeing Britain through to the other side. 

Anthony Seldon is writing “Sunak at 10”. With thanks to Tom Egerton for help with this article.