Or is he just a member of the metropolitan elite who is prepared to say and do whatever it takes to win favour? They will put forward vague and nice sounding promises drawn from the nattering of focus groups and that will be the extent of it. This is apparently the case for Starmer himself too, as recent events testify in keeping with Ashcroft's discoveries. I encourage another reviewer swinging between two possible ratings to balance mine out by going for the higher one. The Politician sees Starmer elected to parliament, and immediately thrust into the life of the Labour MP and indeed into the febrile atmosphere of the then Labour parties relationships and factions: those who supported the then leader Jeremy Corbyn and those who didn't (in simple terms).

He asserted that the ‘independent’ Rose report had refuted accusations of a systemic problem with spycops, when in fact it was a patent whitewash. The prosecutor famously told journalists that he opposed harsh sentences in response to the 2011 riots, when in fact he had taken concrete steps to increase their severity. During his time there he ignored complaints by the Catholic population of Ireland that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was still largely a tool of the British state engaged in oppressing communities based on religious belief.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In 2008, he was appointed director of public prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales, a role he held until 2013. This period of his career has until now been very much under-examined, with Starmer escaping scrutiny and accountability. Jimmy Mubenga was killed by guards hired by the home office in a botched deportation, Starmer recommended no prosecution despite a later inquest ruling informal death. This for me was the most interesting chapter as there are some good insights and inputs from people who worked in Millbank, LOTO (prior to Corbyn's departure) and other MPs and Labour party officials.

Starmer refused to prosecute the PC on grounds of “inconsistent medical evidence” despite the fact that two separate post-mortems recommended the charge of manslaughter. I particularly like the claim that Starmer is not merely a vacuous career politician but actually does have some politics, albeit ones that ought to terrify us: statist, socially conservative, and nigh-on authoritarian.

Starmer’s conduct during the and after the demonstrations in London after the murder of Mark Duggan demonstrate neatly why he fails to understand minority communities and ended up referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment” in time as opposed to the global movement it really is. Holden describes how Labour Together pursued its objectives with a substantial pot of undeclared funding, which it used to secretly insert itself into the Labour Party's 'antisemitism crisis' at a time when it was publicly maintaining a position of neutrality in the Party's vicious factional-infighting. Other people around the country who were suspended for precisely the same reasons as me were readmitted months before me, and I was obviously being singled out and targeted by the Right Wing Labour machine. This authoritative – but not authorised – biography by Tom Baldwin provides answers by drawing deeply on many hours of interviews with the Labour leader himself, as well as unprecedented access to members of his family, his oldest friends and closest colleagues.

Together, they tell an unexpectedly intimate story filled with feelings of grief and love that has driven him on more than any rigid ideology or loyalty to a particular faction. It reveals, for the first time, the way the project sabotaged Corbynism through covert plotting, propelled Starmer to Labour's leadership and now, having crushed the left in the party, poses an imminent threat to British democracy as a whole. The broader political initiative, a billionaire policing the boundaries of working-class authenticity so intensely that nobody without rickets can ever be Labour leader again, is so absurd it’s almost endearing; but it doesn’t provide a very three-dimensional portrait of the man.Biographies must be loaded with fresh knowledge, but perhaps the greatest skill of the author is to convert systematic information into a coherent and engaging story.