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0:22

Hello,

0:22

my name's Michael Crick

0:25

and welcome to Mug Shots, a weekly

0:27

podcast where we examine the character

0:30

and career of some big shot

0:32

in public life, somebody who's trying

0:34

to lead and change our world.

0:37

Having looked at Paul Dacre, Angela

0:39

Rayner, Jürgen Klopp and Ron

0:42

DeSantis in recent weeks, among others,

0:45

today we're painting a portrait

0:47

of Sakhir Stama who last

0:49

week celebrated his third birthday,

0:52

as leader of the Labour Party, that is. and

0:54

in less than two years, Sakhir

0:57

could be in Downing Street as

0:59

the 7th Prime Minister in

1:01

Labour history.

1:03

Sakhir was a latecomer to politics

1:06

after nearly 30 years in the law and

1:09

like Rishi Sunak, he's only been

1:11

an MP since 2015. That

1:14

means there's rather less political record

1:17

to help us explore who Stama

1:19

really is. Now the polls suggest

1:22

that Stama has a bit of a personal

1:24

problem with the British public.

1:27

Voters like his party a

1:29

lot more than they like him, which

1:32

isn't a good position for a party

1:34

leader. Indeed, the boss of the pollsters

1:37

Ipsos said a few days ago that he could

1:40

be the least popular opposition

1:42

leader to become Prime Minister in

1:45

modern history.

1:46

Voters say they don't know what he stands

1:49

for, that he's underwhelming

1:51

and sparks little enthusiasm.

1:54

So to get a better idea of

1:56

whose stammer is, I've delved back

1:59

into his lea- passed and

2:01

spoken to two socialist lawyers

2:03

who've known Sakhir since the late

2:06

1980s. The Labour peer Baroness

2:09

Helena Kennedy knew Starmer when

2:11

he was a young barrister's pupil

2:13

and joined her chambers in 1987. Helena

2:15

Kennedy, have you had

2:18

to sum up?

2:19

Here's Starmer and three adjectives. What

2:22

would they be? Principles, brilliant,

2:25

strategic. Professor Bill

2:27

Bowering, a barrister who's now also Also an

2:29

academic first came across the

2:31

young Starmer in a group of

2:34

radical lawyers. Ambitious, modernizer,

2:38

ruthless. Keir

2:42

Rodney Starmer was born in

2:44

London on 2 September 1962. Named

2:49

Keir, it's said, by his Labour supporting

2:51

parents after the very first Labour

2:54

leader, Keir Hardy.

2:56

No pressure there then. The

2:58

family moved to Surrey where Stalmer's father

3:00

was a tool maker and his mother Jo was

3:03

a nurse, though she suffered the

3:05

rare arthritic Stills disease,

3:08

so life wasn't easy for a family

3:10

of six in their small home on

3:13

the outskirts of Oxford. Keirr

3:15

passed the 11 plus, went to Rygate

3:17

Grammar School and was a leading figure

3:20

in the East Surrey Labour

3:22

Party Young Socialists. big

3:24

organisation I imagine. He was also

3:27

very musical and played the flute,

3:29

the violin and the piano and attended

3:32

the Guildhall School of Music.

3:34

Michael Ashcroft's biography shows

3:36

how Starmer spent half his gap gear helping

3:39

disabled people at a study centre

3:41

in Cornwall.

3:42

He then studied law at Leeds and

3:45

at Oxford where he helped to edit

3:47

a Trotskyist magazine called Socialist

3:50

Alternatives.

3:51

Finally, he took the exams to become

3:53

a barrister. Here's

3:55

Helena Kennedy again. his

4:00

bar exams and had

4:02

been very, very successful

4:05

academically. And so we brought

4:07

him in as a pupil.

4:08

And he was very,

4:11

very much one of the cleverest that

4:13

we'd had. And we're pretty demanding set of chambers.

4:16

And we I old my first memory of

4:18

him was here was this really rather

4:20

nice looking young man, incredibly

4:24

bristling with the eagerness. And,

4:27

and we all used to the more senior people

4:29

in chambers like myself and Jeff

4:31

Robertson and the other QC

4:33

is Edward Fitzgerald, Casey's

4:35

now, but we used to argue over

4:38

having him to work on cases we were

4:40

doing because he was such a great researcher.

4:43

He was terrific at also, you could

4:45

give him a pile of papers, you know, two

4:47

feet high and in big

4:49

cases that's the volume of

4:50

material you would get and he could, you

4:53

know, go away overnight and he could sort

4:56

of hone it all down

4:58

and give you a sort of three sheets of paper

5:01

with all the key issues of law

5:03

and the key evidential factual areas

5:06

that related to it. And he

5:08

would be able to do this incredible summation.

5:11

So that was my first

5:13

memory of him was that he was

5:15

one of the brightest and best pupils we'd ever

5:17

had. Did you see him as a future

5:19

politician, a future leader of the Labour

5:21

Party? not at all. I saw

5:23

him as a future judge. I didn't anticipate

5:28

that he would go into politics at all. I

5:30

thought he was such a brilliant lawyer that he

5:32

would stay in the law. A point

5:34

came, I mean, he did lots and lots

5:37

of interesting work. And he was my junior,

5:39

certainly in a big murder trial. And

5:42

I remember very well the work he did

5:44

with me on it. I also remember

5:46

that he did a lot of good pro

5:48

bono work and some

5:50

of that was on death penalty cases in

5:53

both the Caribbean and in in countries

5:55

in Africa. And he was very, very

5:58

committed And those are very demanding and difficult.

6:00

Jesus and Michael, because you really are

6:02

carrying the life of people

6:04

in your hands. And he

6:06

was a very, very good

6:09

advocate in the

6:11

courts and had such a fine mind

6:13

that he was always very respected by judges. I

6:16

saw him as a lawyer. It was also in

6:18

the late 1980s that Bill Bowring

6:20

got to know the young stammer.

6:22

You say he was ambitious. What

6:24

was he ambitious to do? I mean, did he intend

6:27

one day to go into politics, do you think? I

6:29

don't think he could have foreseen exactly

6:32

the course that things would take. But

6:34

what I say is if you told him way

6:37

back in 1987 that

6:39

he would become Sir Gistama

6:42

Casey, former director of public prosecutions,

6:45

leader of the Labour Party, potential prime

6:47

minister, he wouldn't have about

6:50

ignited, I don't think.

6:52

So there was always that sort of slight

6:54

political side to him nagging

6:56

away that it might be an option. more

6:58

so than that. And

7:00

of course, you know, life

7:02

created opportunities for him and he took them. However,

7:06

he was always and still is very

7:08

keen to tell people how working

7:11

class he is. When

7:13

I originally knew him that took,

7:15

I mean, he would mention it now and then, he

7:18

certainly regarded himself as more working

7:20

class than most of the barristers. and

7:23

that may have been true. And

7:25

for example he played five-a-side football

7:28

on the weekends so that was

7:30

part of it and he

7:32

would like a pint of beer. Do you regard him

7:34

as coming from a working-class background? Certainly

7:38

he came from a very low

7:40

middle-class background you know his father was

7:42

a tool maker as we know and

7:45

he

7:48

was able to get

7:50

pretty well educated who

7:53

certainly was not in the organised

7:55

industrial working class. I

7:58

don't think it has ever got to know.

8:00

really anything very much about trade

8:02

unions. In the 1980s, Bill

8:04

Bowring and 30 other Labour councillors

8:06

in Lambeth refused to set a legal

8:09

budget in protest against

8:11

the Thatcher government's financial controls

8:13

on councils. He and his

8:16

Labour colleagues were all disqualified from

8:18

holding public office for five

8:20

years for what Bowring admits

8:23

was deliberately breaking the law.

8:25

That's not something that Starmer would

8:27

ever do, he says. I guess Stama would never

8:30

break the law, you think? Absolutely not. Do

8:32

you think he's ever taken drugs?

8:34

I think I can say categorically he's

8:36

never taken drugs.

8:37

Both Bill Barring and Helena Kennedy

8:39

were heavily involved with Stama in

8:41

the Haldane Society, a

8:44

group of socialist and left-wing lawyers,

8:47

many of whom were communists. Though

8:49

the society was named after Lord

8:51

Haldane, a former liberal imperialist

8:54

who briefly served as Lord Chancellor

8:57

during the first Labour government of Ramsay-McDonald

9:00

in 1924.

9:02

Now, Starmer, just 27, and

9:05

still a very junior lawyer, wanted

9:07

to modernise the Haldane Society

9:10

and

9:10

produced a programme to make it more like

9:12

the well-known campaigning civil

9:14

rights group, Liberty.

9:16

He urged his Haldane colleagues to

9:18

reject their rather chaotic past

9:21

and adopt a more professional,

9:23

disciplined way of doing things

9:25

to modernise. His most

9:27

contentious suggestion, though, was that

9:30

they should ditch the term socialist

9:32

and call themselves progressive instead.

9:35

Keir argued for and

9:37

got for a period, premises,

9:41

a paid worker and a separate

9:44

educational trust, Justice Liberty

9:46

has,

9:47

to carry out legal

9:49

training for money, that's

9:52

continuing professional development training.

9:55

And so for a period Haldane

9:57

had, which it had never had in its past, premises

10:02

and a worker and a

10:05

educational trust with money-making

10:09

training programs. But he wanted

10:11

to get rid of the name Haldane, which was named

10:13

after the first Labour Lord Chancellor.

10:16

He wanted to get rid of socialist. And he wanted

10:18

to get rid of the word socialist. Absolutely. In

10:21

an angry debate, Stama was defeated

10:23

on the name changes but persuaded

10:26

colleagues to accept his other modernisation

10:29

plans. So what does this tell us about

10:31

Starmer then? All the way through his

10:33

career, he's been a modernizer and

10:35

a technocrat.

10:37

So that's how he started with Haldane.

10:40

He was certainly a very good organiser.

10:43

And here's Helena Kennedy on how Starmer

10:45

tried to modernise the Haldane Society.

10:47

He was always incredibly

10:50

sensible and always had a sort of very

10:52

strong sense that, you know, organisations

10:55

can be all over the shop. And

10:58

he always had a rather fine mind about making

11:00

things work well, and that

11:02

people who were specialists in immigration

11:04

law and people who were specialists in housing

11:06

law, that they should pool their experience

11:09

in order to look at whether the law needed

11:11

reform, how it could be more

11:13

effective in delivering justice

11:16

for particular sections of the community.

11:18

So he did try to get it to be a much

11:20

more, you know, rather than a crowd

11:23

of people just meeting and having talks, which,

11:25

you know, lots of organizations

11:27

do, he wanted it to have a much more

11:30

clear view about where

11:32

law reform was necessary and

11:34

how one could argue for such law reform. Sounds

11:37

a bit like what he's trying to do at the Labour Party, reorganise

11:39

it instead of just

11:42

being a talking shop. I

11:44

think you might be onto something there. I

11:47

think he's had experience of doing that. And I think

11:49

he tried to do it at the Crime

11:51

Prosecution Service when he was the director of

11:53

public prosecutions.

11:54

He's somebody who will know what's going on

11:56

in every department. I mean, he is somebody

11:59

who takes the sort of broad

12:00

view. I mean, this is

12:01

not somebody like, like

12:04

some of our more previous prime ministers

12:06

like Dear Boris,

12:07

don't go into the detail. Here

12:10

is someone who's a detailed man, he's a details

12:12

man. He really is interested

12:13

in the fine print, knowing

12:16

why things are being done in

12:18

a particular way and then looking at how they can be more

12:20

effective. So I think He is doing that to

12:22

the Labour Party, it's true.

12:31

in

12:52

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12:54

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ready, with SAP. Visit

12:59

SAP.com slash be ready.

13:07

Starmer the junior barrister also

13:09

went on national television to argue

13:11

that wigs and gowns for judges

13:14

and lawyers should be scrapped and

13:16

that courts should be more like GP's

13:19

health centres. That didn't stop

13:21

him in 2002 from becoming

13:24

a QC, Queen's Council,

13:27

which is odd, he later remarked, since

13:29

I often used to propose the abolition of

13:31

the monarchy.

13:33

Starma's practice was largely based

13:35

on human rights and among his

13:38

pro bono work was the famous

13:40

MacLible case where he

13:42

successfully defended two protesters

13:45

who were being sued by McDonald's

13:48

for defamation. Here's

13:49

Bill Barring again. Russian

14:02

Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London

14:04

with polonium poison. I'm very glad

14:06

to say we won the case

14:08

on the 16th of September 2021

14:11

and the European Court

14:15

of Human Rights found that Litvinenko

14:17

had been murdered by Russia.

14:20

So I think Keir is

14:22

an excellent lawyer, a

14:25

good human rights lawyer, wrote

14:27

a leading textbook on human rights. And

14:30

I think he's in his element in

14:32

Prime Minister's questions when he's cross-examining

14:35

whoever the

14:37

Prime Minister might be. I think

14:40

he's excellent at that. But what he's not

14:42

good at is making speeches. And

14:45

I think the speeches at the Labour

14:48

Party conference have improved, but he

14:51

makes the impression of somebody who finds it very

14:53

painful

14:54

to give such a speech. In 2008,

14:57

to many people's surprise, Kierstama

15:00

took the job which would put him on

15:02

the national stage and

15:04

ultimately take him into politics. Though

15:06

frankly, if he'd planned to go into politics

15:09

when he took the post, he probably

15:11

wouldn't have accepted the knighthood that

15:13

went with it. And then a point came

15:16

when the Director of Public Prosecution's

15:18

role came up. And in fact, a previous

15:20

pupil of mine, Ken McDonald, had

15:23

been the Director of Public Prosecutions prior

15:26

to Keir, and he now sits as

15:28

a crossbencher in the House of Lords. Keir came

15:30

to me and said, I've been approached

15:32

about whether I would be interested in applying to

15:34

become the Director of Public Prosecutions, and

15:37

I encouraged him to do it because

15:39

I thought it was very interesting. We

15:42

essentially did a lot of defence

15:44

work

15:45

and a lot of judicial review

15:47

and a lot of high-level civil

15:50

work, but it was good for him

15:52

to get a chance of

15:53

doing work leading

15:55

the prosecutorial teams of the Crime

15:57

Prosecution Service and I thought it would be a very

16:00

powerful role for him to have.

16:02

And he was interviewed through

16:05

different tiers and he was eventually

16:07

appointed to that role. And I think he was

16:09

a very effective director of public prosecutions.

16:12

That's important because it gives you a whole

16:15

set of experience. It gives you experience

16:17

of a managerial experience. It

16:20

gives you experience

16:21

of having to have a huge

16:23

caseload. And of course, many different

16:26

senior prosecutors

16:27

are conducting their own, know, they

16:29

have their own caseloads, but they come to

16:31

the director who's basically

16:34

the chief executive and is really

16:36

guiding the strategy of the CPS

16:38

and so on. And I was thrilled because when

16:41

he was in that role,

16:42

he was very committed to

16:46

getting better results in domestic

16:48

violence and in relation to violence against

16:50

women. And while

16:51

it was, you know, it's

16:54

nowhere good enough, It was, he took

16:56

it to a much better level

16:58

than had been the case before and

17:01

was involved in many of the cases

17:03

that were about trying to prosecute

17:05

grooming of girls and so

17:08

on in the northern cities. Starma

17:10

had been appointed Director of Public Prosecutions

17:13

or DPP by

17:14

the Brown government, but served most

17:16

of his time under the coalition, where

17:19

he impressed the Conservative Attorney

17:21

General Dominic Greve. As

17:24

DPP, Starma was also

17:26

head of the Crown Prosecution

17:28

Service, the CPS, the

17:30

state body which oversees criminal

17:32

prosecutions in England and Wales,

17:35

in charge of around 8,000 staff based

17:39

in 13 different regions. He

17:42

is to this day very proud of having

17:44

run a big public organisation, which

17:47

very few other politicians have. And

17:50

his like-momentive right from the beginning

17:52

was to modernize the CPS.

17:55

so he talks a lot

17:57

about the modern prosecutor. And

18:00

that is very much his phrase. And

18:03

I think that in that sense, he

18:05

was a good director of public prosecutions.

18:08

And I think it's very interesting since

18:10

becoming leader of the Labour Party. His

18:14

politics are very much politics of better

18:17

government, modernisation. Modernisation,

18:21

he's in favour of retaining the United Kingdom.

18:24

And he said in his speeches, he wants to

18:26

modernise it. So I would say

18:29

throughout his career, Kirsten

18:31

has been a modernizer, an organizer

18:35

and a technocrat, but not

18:38

somebody with big visions. How

18:40

do you feel when you see your former

18:43

colleague deciding that

18:45

Jeremy Corbyn shouldn't be allowed to stand as

18:47

a Labour candidate, when you see him

18:49

presiding over a selection

18:52

system for candidates that has almost

18:54

entirely excluded anybody

18:57

you might describe as being on the left.

18:59

Well, I would say that that is

19:03

very aptly conveyed by the

19:05

word ruthless.

19:06

So I would say that Keir Starmer is

19:08

somebody who was absolutely determined

19:11

to become leader of the Labour Party

19:13

and worked very hard to

19:15

do so, made a whole series of promises

19:18

in order to get elected, elected, which he's now ditching

19:20

or has ditched. And

19:24

in his mind, this is experience. In order

19:26

to become Prime Minister,

19:28

he's

19:29

decided he has to cut

19:31

away, even though he served

19:33

under Corbyn of course, in the shadow

19:36

cabinet, but he has made up his

19:38

mind he has to cut away everything associated

19:41

with that previous regime. And

19:44

as I said earlier on, I think a big problem

19:46

with Giers, and he has no idea about the

19:48

trade union movement, or trade

19:51

unions, actually. And

19:53

I think that will give him a lot of grief in the

19:55

future in

19:56

the Labour Party.

20:12

Helena Kennedy, who helped raise tens

20:14

of thousands of pounds from fellow

20:16

left-wing lawyers for Starma's leadership

20:18

campaign three years ago,

20:20

remains much more positive about

20:22

him. Do you think the young human

20:25

rights lawyer has become too

20:28

authoritarian or something? thinking

20:30

the way he runs the Labour Party. I mean, most

20:32

recently, of course, the decision to stop

20:35

Jeremy Corbyn being a candidate, but also

20:37

the

20:38

way in which the left have been almost

20:41

annihilated when it comes to the

20:43

selection of parliamentary candidates. The problem

20:46

has been that the Labour Party

20:48

suffered the most massive defeat of the

20:50

last election. And we've got to be clear about that.

20:53

They were virtually annihilated. And

20:55

as a result, there's had

20:57

to be a real rethink. and a recovery

21:00

of many people. I know lots of, I

21:02

have lots of Jewish friends who basically said,

21:04

I'll never vote Labour again. Well, I mean,

21:07

that's a terrible thing that people

21:09

feel that a party has been destroyed by

21:11

that. Now, let me tell you, I do

21:13

think that there was a lot of

21:15

gleefulness in certain sections of

21:17

the media

21:18

and certain kinds of trawling

21:20

and so on that went on that was to exacerbate

21:22

that. But there's no doubt that there was an anti-Semitic

21:25

problem in the Labour party. And the problem was

21:27

that Jeremy Corbyn didn't deal with it well.

21:29

He didn't ever get on a train and travel up to Liverpool

21:32

to see the young woman who was being harassed

21:35

and threatened and suffering

21:38

as a consequence. He didn't do the

21:40

things a sensible leader would normally

21:42

do. So, he has been faced

21:44

with the business of having to

21:46

resurrect almost from the grave

21:49

a party that was annihilated. And

21:51

so, of course, people are going to say they're

21:53

not happy with how he's done it. And in some ways

21:56

I don't know whether it's a

21:58

good idea.

21:59

idea banning

22:01

somebody like Jeremy Corbyn. But

22:04

I do think he's been faced with an incredibly

22:06

difficult task and he has to reassure

22:08

the public the Labour Party is a party that

22:11

they can vote for safely and that

22:13

does recognise the values

22:15

that matter to the general public. Can't

22:17

Starmer be accused of a degree

22:20

of deception as well in that the promises on

22:22

which he was elected Labour leader, many

22:24

of them have now been junked, like abolishing university

22:27

tuition You know, the man who only

22:29

three years ago

22:30

would describe Jeremy Corbyn

22:32

as his friend now says he never was

22:34

his friend. I mean, can he be trusted?

22:38

Oh, Michael, you really are coming out with

22:40

the stuff that you would normally see in the daily mail.

22:43

But look, these are valid questions. And

22:46

come on, that is a valid question, no matter

22:48

where it comes from. Yeah, it's

22:50

a valid question because because the question

22:52

has arisen from certain sections of our society

22:54

is he to be trusted? I consider

22:57

him to be a highly trustworthy person, and I

22:59

consider him as a person of integrity, a

23:01

real integrity. And we can't pretend

23:03

that we've seen an awful lot of that around in

23:05

recent times in our leadership.

23:09

Look at what was happening. He was somebody who was

23:11

very much believed that it was the interest of the

23:13

nation to remain in the European

23:15

Union. And he led that. And it was important

23:18

for him. We all persuaded him, stay

23:21

in. Carbon is not a pro-European

23:23

person. We need somebody who passionately

23:25

leaves the match to lead the

23:27

campaign around that inside

23:28

labour and the period thereafter

23:31

after the referendum. So he was persuaded

23:33

to stay in there. He wanted to go. He

23:35

wanted to leave the Corbyn front bench.

23:37

Yes, and many of us persuaded

23:39

him that he should stay there because we needed

23:41

to have a voice of sanity in there. The

23:44

voice there of Baroness Helena

23:46

Kennedy, a great admirer of Keir

23:48

Starmer, who's played a major role

23:51

over the years in promoting his career

23:53

both as a lawyer and as a politician.

23:56

my thanks to her and also to

23:59

Bill Bowring.

24:00

a former left-wing colleague at the bar who

24:02

takes a rather more skeptical view of

24:05

Stama, the would-be Prime Minister.

24:07

Despite their political differences,

24:10

both our contributors today admire

24:12

Sakir Stama for his organisational

24:15

skills and his ability to

24:17

modernise an institution, be

24:19

it the Haldane Society, the

24:21

CPS or the Labour Party.

24:24

Stama may lack charisma, He may

24:26

be uninspiring, but with the collapse

24:29

of so many state institutions, the

24:31

NHS, our universities, the

24:33

police among them,

24:35

perhaps a radical organiser, a moderniser,

24:38

is just what Britain needs. That's

24:41

all from this edition of Mugshots, and

24:44

remember, you can catch up with our previous

24:46

portraits who include Angela

24:48

Rayner, Kemi Badenoch, Ron DeSantis

24:51

and Jürgen Klopp, wherever

24:53

it is that you get your podcasts.

24:57

Goodbye. Mug

25:01

Shots was produced and presented by Michael

25:03

Crick with Neil Fern and me,

25:06

Alex Reis. The lead producer for Podmasters

25:08

was Jacob Jarvis and the group editor

25:10

was Andrew Harrison. Mug Shots is

25:13

a Podmasters production. I'm

25:15

not going to do that.

25:21

Intelligence Squared

25:23

podcast is the home of debates and

25:25

discussion to get you thinking. Join

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us a few times a week to get a little bit

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closer to some of the brightest minds

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on the planet and to be part of the biggest

25:34

conversations of our times. People

25:36

are counting on me and on you tonight

25:38

to speak for them in this debate. is

25:40

a part of Russian propaganda

25:42

right now. As you as well. Is

25:46

there anything that you guys think can make you

25:48

great right across from Alfred to Victoria?

25:50

I think being a woman. Yeah. Find

25:53

us at Intelligence Squared, wherever

25:55

you get your podcasts.