YouSaid · the spoken record

Sir Keir Starmer

lines on the record: 21
first: 2024-06-14
most recent: 2024-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Everyone thinks that Labour can't do anything because it's all about money. If you think about things that what people remember from the Blair government, the Good Friday Agreement, the minimum wage Devolution, Bank of England, those are all things I did earlier. I mean, Warner Rat came later. That's defined in the second term. But a lot of things they did early on were about not spending money, but changing the country in other ways. I think you're going to see quite a lot of radicalism and quite a lot of change in that first 12 months, which people aren't concentrating on enough at the moment.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they say is they cross each bridge when it comes. And, you know, that's what they've always done. I think, you know, his daughter said that she doesn't want to move. I think Vic says she's going to carry on working at local hospital. I think I'm going to try and make it work for everybody.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is, and I think HB's family into it at all, and I don't think Vic particularly wants to be part of his political brand. She'll do party conferences and vocational pictures, but she's not going to be Cherie Blair. You're not going to see the kids outside Downing Street. He's not going to name them. He's never going to use their names. He is really, really protective of them. And the thing that keeps them up at night, he says he really bothers him, is whether doing this job or becoming Prime Minister is going to affect them and he really worries about that. And I don't know quite how they're going to handle it all. I don't think they've quite faced up to it. I don't think they sort of, you know, they're still in a little bit denial about what that changed.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hit him like a sledgehammer because I think he had been given bad advice that he still had a chance of winning the seat. He thought that he could campaign effectively and the Tories won it by mile. And he went into the office that day, determined to resign, and it took conversations with his wife, Vic. It took conversations with his aides. It took conversations with a lot of people to persuade him that not only could he cling on, that wasn't enough, but that he could actually still go on and win a general election. And I think from that moment on, he wanted to change the party further and faster. He talks about changing the party inside out. So it was just facing its activists. He's turned it inside out so it now faces the electorate. And he thinks the opposite's happened to the Tories.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but which one do you want? I mean, if the party hadn't changed, would it be 20 points in the lead and polls? I don't think so. 2019, it wasn't trusted on the economy. It wasn't trusted with nation security. So, you know, the Tories keep saying Keystar's changed. They're actually re-emphasizing his key selling point at this election. His single slogan as election is changed. I've changed my party. I can change the country. And I think I'm not sure it's a great gift to the Tories, this one.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one interpretation is that it's overstated in that there's still quite a lot of radical policy, I think, to the left of Blair and Brown. They never re-nationalized the railways. They never had lots of new workers' rights. They never had big industrial policy. I think people can sort of be a bit sort of glass half empty rather than glass half full about how radical Labour's program is. The other thing is that he is someone who changes his mind. And there's a sort of sense that in politics you're expected to carry on with whatever you promised when common sense and in ordinary life people don't do that. When the circumstances of the chain and you've had COVID, you've had Ukraine, you've had Liz Truss putting up the price of borrowing by £90 billion. It'd be a bit weird not to change your mind a bit.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From twenty eighteen he was having meetings once a week at his friend and colleague's house, Jenny Chapman, who's one of his junior spokespeople on Brexit. And they were developing a leadership strategy and more and more people eventually Morgan McSweeney came in. And this was all happening. I mean, it could have been a huge story at the time, but we were so obsessed by the scandals and ruptions over Brexit that it was almost in plain sight. And, you know, so he was very definitely ready and very well prepared. He compares it a bit to being a footballer, as always. He says, like, you know, you know the team's going to get relegated at the end of season, but you turn up for training, you do your job, you try your best on the pitch, but at the same time you might be doing your coaching badges because you think the manager's going to get sacked and maybe you can become coach afterwards.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something else interesting about all this You think about Brexit, that sort of burning theatre Almost all these careers turned to ashes. Prime Ministers lead the opposition, shadow Brexit secretaries, Brexit secretaries, all of them. Two people escaped that theatre, untouched. Boris Johnson and Kit Starmer and Boris Johnson self-hummoliated a couple of years later. The idea that Keir Starmer is not good at politics is wrong. As soon as 2019 was over, he'd moved towards supporting people's vote and a second referendum. As soon as that was over, he was gone. Some of us were still trapped on Romaniac Island. He was gone. It was over. And he moves very fast and very ruthlessly. He certainly doesn't hang around.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Davis, stop him after one big debate on Brexit, saying words to the wise old man, you know. Get bogged down in the detail, it never works. Details what matters. That's why I'm here.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I just think he doesn't like it very much. A lot of people who come into Westminster from outside and say we're going to drain the swamp and that's the sort of populism. He's almost an anti-populist. He wants politics to be more serious. He wants to be more factual, more evidence-based. And Kier, you know, he says to me when he first became an MP, he looked around and saw all these debates come without people really knowing what they're talking about. He went more into his lawyer shell, he said. He said, actually, no one's dealing with facts. No one's dealing with detail. So for instance, when he becomes Shadow Brexit Secretary, he tells a story about sitting on the front bench with Jeremy Corbyn. And Theresa May is doing some important announcement about Brexit. He's trying to listen. And Corbyn sat listening, reading Hansard about some bicycle lanes in Camden, saying this is, and I guess I know this is really important. He says, yeah, but the Prime Minister say, and he just didn't think that people were getting across the detail. He tells another story about David.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First time I met him actually because I was working for Ed Miliband at the time and after coming to his office because there was sat kiss on me. He said, Keir Starmer is going to be an MP just been selected. And can you give him some help if he needs any comms advice? So a week later, I phoned him up and said, here I am. Do you want any help? And he said, well, I've actually just been talking to Master Campbell, my neighbour. So I think I'm all right. I went, fair enough.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was under Ed Miliband's leadership, and that he knew Ed Miliband, and so probably had that advantage, and the selection process got underway late. The reason for that was because Keir Starmer had been at the CPS. He couldn't be a member of the party, and you can't be a candidate for the party unless he'd been a member for 12 months. So the delayed process until those 12 months were over. That's the kind of biggest help he think he got. I mean, he took on three or four candidates who are probably better known in the constituency and beat them by knocking on lots of doors. And lots of members came to these elections meetings and no one has seen for years. So I think he probably won at Fair and Square, but he was provided some assistance to allow him to stand.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just on that, there's an amazing interview did with a rather underdefined title called Civil Service World. Very fine publication where he talked about his record at CPS. And he said one of the things he was proudest of, this is so starish. Was moving from paper files to digital files. He says you're never going to get headlines for this, but this was a profound reform of the legal service, which improved justice and sped things up. That's sort of about someone who's interested in outcomes rather than big reforms and flashy radical policies is actually saying, what can we do to improve efficiency and make the service better?”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you might have a point. You'd come and see me in my office, and they've become close allies since, and his campaign for changes of the law with her on victims' law. And I think there's something very interesting about someone who listens and adapts. And I think that's what he's done through his. He doesn't have this, you know, he'd still be a radical human rights lawyer. There are lots of them now. And he'd be very comfortable. He faced a lot of criticism from other human rights lawyers when he went to work for the CPS. He went for work for the other side. And they couldn't understand why he was doing it. But I think that openness to other influences and to be affected by experiences is quite a good sign.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's someone who changes his mind on things. And I don't think that's a terrible crime. I mean, it's sometimes seen as a crime in politics. There's a story about a woman called Claire Waxman, which I tell in my book, who just after you stopped being charged at CPS, came to see him. She was really cross about some decisions the CPS had taken when it was there because she had been victim of a terrible stalking case. She went along to one of his meetings, just been starting out to be campaign. And she sat in the back with her arms folded furious, hating him. At the end, she came up to him, wanting to have a row, and said, yeah, you did all this, you did all that. And he listened. He said, well,”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's a slightly bogus charge in some ways because lawyers believe when people get in fair trials. It doesn't mean they approve of what they're accused of doing. I think there was something quite interesting to see, though, in his legal career, because if you track it, he does change. He changes from this as a sort of self-consciously radical human rights lawyer into someone that sees human rights actually applied to victims of crime as well as alleged perpetrators of it. I think his view of the state changes. He goes out and works in Northern Ireland as an advisor to the Northern Ireland Police Service during the Good Friday Agreement. And he begins to see that actually you can bring more change by working on the inside. And people say, what's he going to be like in government? He's actually got a record of running...”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think he was a sort of self-consciously radical human rights lawyer at a time when just human rights were beginning to break through as a thing. And as quite often it's life that was quite well timed because before long you had labour coming in and passing a human rights act and he was expert in it. And he wrote the textbooks. These aren't books which anybody who's not a human rights lawyer would want to read. They are how to do manuals. They are dry as dust. And that's him. He's not the flamboyant lawyer with the sort of, you know, the jury in the palm of his hands. He's detail, he's evidence, his facts, his points of law. He's very sort of unpolitical in that sense.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, he's always had this football part of him, which I think he's used to normalize himself, you know, this obsessive hard work on the one hand and then playing football and going to the pub afterwards. But he then went on from Oxford to live in effectively a sort of pre-dilapidated flat above a brothel. And he tells stories about getting to know the women working below. And I think he helped them out with some of their legal cases. The landlord...”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, he wasn't punting down the chowel or joining the Bullunding Club. He was in the library. He was one of those graduates in the library. And, you know, I mean, I think 14 out of 18 post-war British prime ministers have been to Oxford. Three didn't go to university, or one went to Edinburgh. And there is an extraordinary dominance of one university on politics. In his mind, he's not an Oxford person. He did a one-year vocational course to get into the bar and he didn't hang out with a lot of other Oxford students, I don't think.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think again it's a sort of slightly working class thing. He talked about doing politics or history and his parents say, no, you need to get a trade. You need to get something which is going to get you a proper job. And that's a lawyer. And, you know, he didn't really know much about the law. He said when he got to Leeds, he didn't know what difference between a solicitor and a barrister was. And quite often in his life he's had this experience of feeling he doesn't quite belong when he starts. I think he felt that when he joined a bar. I think he felt it actually even when he became an MP and that sense of having to work a bit harder that, you know, he doesn't have that sort of swaggering entitlement that some people in politics have. He feels he has to work harder to prove himself every time.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, and he quickly decided he didn't want an autobiography, didn't want 350 pages of him talky about himself. That's one of the reasons why I think he's a bit different to other politicians who love talking about themselves. And so we did a sort of unauthorised biography, but I'd got a lot of material from inside his head already. So I think we made it much more intimate and that sort of interiority, I think, is quite a big difference.”
2024-06-14 · Newscast · Leader Profiles: Sir Keir Starmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source