Sir Keir Starmer: bureaucrat first, politician second

OXFORDMP, 1986. The editorial board of , a tiny magazine that follows the revolutionary ideas of Michel Pablo, an obscure Greek Trotskyist, meets under the guidance of a willowy figure known as “the Frenchman”. Its members include a law student called . His articles are hard to decipher; his main contribution is to take the magazine to the printers and distribute it to bookshops. “Keir was the backroom guy, the one who did the hard work,” a comrade tells Tom Baldwin, author of a penetrating new biography of the ’s leader (these days, Sir Keir). “The rest sat around and talked.”It was the start of a career of dissolving human dramas in bureaucratic procedure. As a police adviser in Northern Ireland, Sir Keir is caught in a hail of rioters’ rocks. Petrol bombs fly. The experience begets a dense report on procedural reform. As Britain’s chief public prosecutor, he brings cases against bent s, newspaper bosses and al-Qaeda cells; he cites as one of his proudest achievements the digitisation of old paper files.