Is Keir Starmer too boring to be prime minister?

‘What do you know about Keir Starmer?’ My friend’s question came as we sat in the pub. It was part of an experiment, based on something he’d noticed.

‘Used to be Director of Public Prosecutions,’ I replied.

‘That’s the first thing everyone says. Anything else?’

‘Er …’ 

John gave me a prompt: ‘Is he married? Does he have kids?’

‘Pretty sure he’s married. And I think he has kids. But not totally sure on either. Certainly couldn’t give you names or ages.’

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‘Constituency?’

This was when it really hit me: Keir Starmer is anti-matter for facts. I had to know his constituency – like John, I’m an amateur political nerd. But somehow the information had exited my memory. What’s more, the answer is Holborn and St Pancras, the former constituency of Frank Dobson, who the Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn used to call ‘the Honourable Member for the two Tube stations’. All this had remained in my brain – but Starmer’s link to it had disappeared.

The ‘anti-matter’ phenomenon is one in which I have professional experience. My books and journalism are often based on trivia, those curious little facts and anecdotes that stick in the memory. Over the years I’ve noticed that there are some people who, no matter how famous they become, are simply devoid of interesting facts. Elizabeth II was a trivia goldmine, but her son Charles is the opposite. Paul McCartney is fascinating, Mick Jagger dull. It’s the same with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi: the former is named after Ronald Reagan, but the equivalent rumour that Messi was named after Lionel Richie is (sadly) untrue.

In politicians, though, the trait is rare. There’s usually something that comes to mind. Ken Livingstone had his newts, Margaret Beckett her caravans, Angela Rayner her record as youngest grandmother in the Commons (37 in 2017). It’s particularly unusual for someone to become a party leader, or even reach the stage where they’re being tipped as one, without trivia clinging to them. Menzies Campbell held the British 100 metres record from 1967 to 1974. Ed Miliband is the same age as tiramisu (he was born on Christmas Eve 1969, the day an Italian restaurateur invented the dessert). Michael Portillo starred in a Ribena advert at the age of eight, and Denis Healey’s middle name was Winston, his parents’ tribute to Churchill (something true also of John Lennon and Gary Lineker). 

And they’re just the contenders. Actually making it to No. 10, as Starmer is expected to, without anyone knowing anything about you – that’s unheard of. Jim Callaghan (the only person ever to be prime minister, chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary) had tattoos on both arms, relics of his days in the Navy (he regretted them, and would never wear short-sleeve shirts). Margaret Thatcher went to the same kindergarten as Nicholas Parsons. Tony Blair was born on the same day of the same year and in the same city as Graeme Souness. (Souness thinks it may even have been the same hospital, as he suspects Edinburgh only had one maternity unit in 1953.) The delightful add-on to this fact is that the pair’s successors as PM and Liverpool FC captain respectively – Gordon Brown and Phil Neal – were themselves born on the same day of the same year.

And yet I wasn’t even sure whether Keir Starmer was married. ‘There has to be something,’ I said to John, reaching for my phone and scrolling through Starmer’s Wikipedia page. ‘Oh yes – named after Keir Hardie, the first ever Labour leader.’ Again, something I’d once known, but which Starmer’s anti-matter status had banished. He’s like those boring people you get stuck with at parties, so bad at small talk that they render you speechless as well, unable to think of anything to ask them. Peter Brookes of the Times nailed Starmer when he drew him as Buzz Lightyear – the chin and the hair look good, but there’s simply nothing else there.

Determined, I carried on scrolling. And there, in the ‘early life and education’ section, was the detail that one of Starmer’s fellow pupils at Reigate Grammar School in the 1970s was Quentin Cook, who later became Norman Cook and finally Fatboy Slim. The pair took violin lessons together. How had I never registered that? Had it been true of any other British politician, the fact would have appeared on our radar by now, like Bernard Jenkin’s wife being Richard Curtis’s ex-girlfriend, which is why many of Curtis’s films include a character called Bernard. But Starmer’s force-field of tedium had nullified it, removing it from the record.

Who knows, maybe this is a deliberate ploy by Starmer and his team. They realise that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them, so they’re happy for the Labour leader to keep his head down and stay under the radar. Either way, if the polls are right, Britain is on course to get its most boring prime minister ever.