Keir Starmer is a “remarkably unremarkable prime minister”, says Tom McTague in The New Statesman. He doesn’t shout or swear. He apologises to aides if he calls them on a Sunday or early in the morning. He stops working for a few hours each evening to be with his wife and children, who are being raised in their mother’s Jewish faith. (The TV comedy Friday Night Dinner, with its familiar depiction of middle-class Jewish life, has them all “roaring with laughter”.) Politics is not Starmer’s “consuming passion”: he has no political hero and finds Westminster “mildly distasteful”. One aide contrasts him with Gordon Brown, who might ask about your family but always wants to get on to politics. “Keir is the opposite. If you’re stuck in a lift with him, you’re talking about your family.”

Even No 10 itself bears few marks of Starmer’s presence. His office has almost no personal mementos: there is a sole photograph of his family behind his desk and a miniature World Cup trophy given to him by former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. But while the PM may come across as detached, he has a raw and emotional edge. When I ask him about his brother Nick, who had learning disabilities and died on Boxing Day last year, the PM wells up. “Well it was, bits of it were hard,” he says, slowly. “He was dying of cancer... he was a vulnerable man.” Starmer describes going to great lengths to keep Nick’s illness secret, smuggling himself into the hospital’s intensive care ward via the porters’ lift. “Everybody anticipates their parents will die before them,” he says, choking up again. “But when your brother dies, [it’s] a whole new thing.”

👴🗳️ It’s easy to forget that at 62, Starmer is an “old prime minister”. He was older when he entered No 10 than Anthony Eden or Harold Wilson were when they left it, the “toll on their bodies” having become too much. He is older than John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the end of their time in power, and only three years younger than Margaret Thatcher when she was ousted in 1990.

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