School Ties

Keir Starmer: A Life of Contrasts by Nigel Cawthorne

This is a short review because the book in question does not merit a longer one. 

The title says it all, in a way. For just as children reporting on foreign parts for primary school geography might declare Mexico, Russia or Mozambique ‘lands of contrasts’, so too can lazy, inept biographers refer to others' lives. And after all, whose life in the history of humanity, except those who never reached adulthood, did not include at least one breach in continuity or reversal of expectation?

This book is badly written in the extreme and interminably boring. The former comes from the innumerable little tortures Cawthorne’s sentences are made to suffer. Some of the latter is due to the greyish nature of its subject. But much of it must be blamed on the inability of the author to assemble, from all his accumulated trivia, anything approaching an interesting story. 

As it is, the story is filled with non sequitur statements and strangely overextended lists. For example, Karl Marx is redundantly included among a list of famous Marxists from whom the Labour left draws inspiration. That famous but perhaps forgotten Marxist, Karl Marx.

The first parts of the book are dominated by two things: an oddly inhuman attempt to conscript the many sufferings of Starmer’s parents — his overworked and distant father, and cripplingly ill mother — into middlebrow heart-warming fare, and a strange and pronounced educational snobbery. Cawthrone makes much of the mundane fact that he and Starmer, at different times, attended the same school. He labours this point continually. It’s pointless in itself, of course, and reveals little about biographer and his subject.

But even if the connection was meaningful, it does not justify an extended introduction focused largely on the price of Reigate Grammar School these days, and how obsessed the book otherwise is with which public schools dead politicians attended, and bizarrely enough, how much these schools charge per student in 2021.

This is a short book, but still feels too long. Containing as it does very little real insight. It is larded with useless information culled from interviews with unnamed nobodies who speak in tabloid clichés; broad and unenlightening historical background; and extracts from church bulletins, typo-ridden local newspapers, fee-paying schools’ websites and, one can only assume, Wikipedia. 

Not only is the book bereft of insight into its subject: everyone else gets the same treatment — with adjectives crammed into descriptions which do not describe anything of note. Because Anthony Crosland kept up a calendar of publication, he was ‘an avid book writer’. Was he really avid in the business of writing books, or did he simply write quite a lot? I suppose there’s no point pausing to disentangle this adjective; the author almost certainly gave it less thought.

The above is also an example of a typically hideous phrase, one of many in this book, and it’s possibly how Cawthorne, who churns out pap like this yearly, imagines himself. An ‘avid’, as opposed to a good, writer. In reality, of course, he should be embarrassed to put his name to this junk.

I pity the publisher, who in these pestilential years was delivered at short notice, not a manuscript, but a bill of goods.