Keir Starmer guests on Table Manners this week

It’s the final episode of season 15 and Jessie and Lennie have invited the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer for dinner. The leader of the Labour party told Jessie and Lennie about his love of experimental cooking, jam sandwiches, the controversy over his desert island discs song choices and the tradition of Friday night shabbat with his family. 

Talking about his family

So I’ve got an older sister, I’m then next. And then we have a brother and sister who are 18 months younger, who are twins. So that’s where we lived. And cooking wise, this is what i would call, a sort of classic working class family. So my dad worked in a factory. He was a toolmaker. My mom was a nurse. But – I don’t know whether you know- that she had Still’s disease when she was young, at 11. Which was basically a very aggressive juvenile arthritis, and it can destroy your system. And luckily for her, they found something that could treat her or at least mitigating. And so because the diagnosis or prognosis at 11, Was that she wouldn’t walk after the age of 20. And she wouldn’t have to have kids. So even the fact that I’m here is a sort of miracle down to Guy’s hospital and what they’re able to do with her. But that meant that in the end, it was just my dad working. And so it was a very traditional setup. Mum did all the cooking.

Memorable dish 

Well, when I was growing up, it was British food. British food always. So my dad was really sort of rigid- frameworked about this. So he wasn’t going to be eating pasta or anything like that. So it was British food, there came a point  – must be when I was a teenager I think  – when my mum sort of branched out and tried a chicken curry. It was one sort of chicken and a bit of curry sauce and some sultanas and a bit of rice. This was really exotic for us, because otherwise it was as you might expect: sausages,  mash,  meat, veg. it was that  – chicken and potatoes or vegetables.  It was always that sort of meat.

Talking about his mum’s illness

Yeah, it was all the time, really. She was in incredible pain and struggling all the time. What’s interesting looking back at it, I don’t think I noticed as much then because she’d contracted this illness before I was born obviously. So that was always how mum was. At meal times, along with the food, there would always be mums tablets that she’d have at every meal because she had to have painkillers and strong tablets, and then other tablets to take away the side effects of the first set of tablets and that sort of thing. So that was part of the routine, if you like, at the table which was the food and then you know all of the tablets and medicines that had to go alongside it.

Family being political 

Not actively. So my dad was a Labour supporter – it was a labour household. And, you know, very strongly believed in the Labour Party and labour movement, And in terms of activity, so he, I remember distinctly he would go to work at eight o’clock in the morning, come home at five o’clock for his tea, and then go back to work at six till 10 o’clock at night, five days a week, this was his routine.

Talking about his mum being a nurse 

No, no, she wasn’t strong enough to go back. And also having four children just didn’t allow her. But she loved the NHS, she was so proud of being a nurse. It was like go for it – like a sort of a rock. It was incredible. So she definitely would have carried on being a nurse, if she could have done.

Childhood

 Yeah, yeah. It was happy, it was – I did a lot of sports. I was playing football the whole time; out the house doing that sort of thing. But yeah, it was. There wasn’t a lot of discussion. We didn’t sort of discuss politics or current affairs around the kitchen table. It wasn’t that kind of household.

What drew Keir to the labour party? 

No, it was just this burning sense that we needed to change things. And that if you’re going to change things, it had to be the Labour party. So it just made absolute sense to me to join the Labour Party as soon as I could. It was just sort of hardwired in me. But it didn’t come out of discussions around the kitchen table. I think it came out of observing –  I mean we didn’t have a lot of money. So I knew, you know, there were times when things were really tough. And we couldn’t afford to pay all the bills. So we’d have to choose, what wouldn’t we pay. And the one we always chose was the telephone. Because that was a landline. It was a monthly payment or whatever it was, and if you’d had a phone cut off, you didn’t have to pay that bill. So it was quite tough in that sense. I mean, i’m not pleading poverty or anything. But it was you know, we knew what it was like not to have a lot of money. And this goes to sort of food as well, because my mum and dad almost never had anyone around. Because my dad felt that people disrespected him because he worked in a factory, he felt really strongly that people looked down on him. And when you know, when people come around for dinner, or whatever it is, and you don’t know everyone, you’re meeting people for the first time, you inevitably have that discussion: Well, what do you do for a living? And he hated that discussion, because he felt that as soon as he said he worked in a factory, people went quiet and didn’t quite know what to say.

Holidays when younger 

When we were on holiday, we’d have takeaway fish and chips on the birthday of any of us.And that big takeaway, bring it home. And then when we were on holiday, we went to Lake District every year because my mom loved the Lake District. And so we always went there. And we would then occasionally eat at pubs, that sort of pub food in the evening. But beyond that, never I mean, I honestly can’t remember go to a restaurant.

Moving to leeds 

Vinegar, definitely.  But then, i  got the chance to go, you know, on a journey that took me away from that sort of small town, working class base, to Leeds University, which was an incredible journey. And one of the speeches I gave the other day was about smashing the glass ceiling, and breaking the link between where young people start in life and where they can get to. And too many children, young people are still, that their future is determined by the earnings and income of their parents rather than their own abilities. This is true. I mean, you know, this is a moral mission like none other. But for me, I was now starting a different journey, which was off to university, which was fantastic. And so I mean, it was eye opening, because you go from a small town, to a city. I’ve never really been to a big city like this before. I’d go as far as Croydon in South London. But I hadn’t got to, you know, a city like Leeds. Suddenly, you’re, you know, this is a big city. It’s diverse. There’s lots of things going on. And suddenly my horizon for food just expanded massively.

Talking about Harriet Herman

Yeah, yeah. And you know, when, in the middle of the really fierce Brexit debates, I was leading for our party on it, so in the middle of the debates, and my dad was dying, and it was awful. And so I’d have to sort of be in the middle of this debate, and then leave that at the end of the day and then get a train down to the hospital that he was in. And it was really, it was the first time I had that very intense, public person, private grief going on. And two or three of the Tory MPs reached out to me, particularly when he died, and that sort of thing you can’t really can’t ever say there’s such tribal politics that we can’t get on and do things together or talk or have coffee or eat if we had time. So, you know, I’m not a great believer in that, you know, divisive politics.

Talking about Jo Cox

No, you can’t please everybody. What Jo Cox, who was a fantastic, fantastic friend and MP came into Parliament on the same day as me and just – a  tragic story. But obviously, she did her maiden speech when she said: “we’ve got more in common than that which divides us” – that is so powerful, and so meaningful. And I think that amongst the reasons the conservatives have gone into this toxic space of divide, culture wars, is because they haven’t got a record that they can stand on, they haven’t got any leadership that they can really believe in. And therefore they’ve gone to this divisive place. And that  relies on politics that says: let’s find the points of difference. So if you and I are going to have a conversation, let’s find where we don’t agree, rather than trying to find what we do agree.

Yes and we have to break out of that, because it’s exhausting. It puts people into camps, they don’t really want to be in –  they are entrenched in those camps. And it means that there’s a sort of a collective lack of belief in politics as a force for good, because everybody just goes further and further to one side or other in the debate, and just shouts at each other, or shouts past each other. So nobody’s listening in this. It’s very corrosive for the idea that I really believe in, which is that politics ought to be a force for good. So we have to find a way to get through that. And there are I mean, this is going back to the thing about different MPs. After Jo Cox died, Theresa May joined the sort of campaign around loneliness, which was one of Jo’s sort of themes on a cross party basis. So there is the ability to do that. And we desperately need to get back to that.

Journey into Parliament 

It’s a journey like all these things are. I didn’t come into parliament to be leader of a party,or to become the Prime Minister. I came into parliament in the hope that Ed Miliband would win the 2015 election, and I might just about become the attorney general or something in his cabinet. So this wasn’t something. And the election, getting labour into government is not about me, it’s not about me going through the door number 10. It’s not about my shadow cabinet becoming the cabinet. It’s not even about the Labour Party, it’s part of the country. It’s about taking the country forward. So that that’s where I sort of come from on it. And that drives me forward. And I know this tough things, and we’ll have to do tough things make difficult decisions. But, and I try not to get ahead of myself. But what you touched on there, one of the things that I’m most worried about is the impact on our children. Now, we’ve been as protective as I hope we can be. So we never named them in public, we never have fought promotional photos done with them. Obviously continue to not do that. When you’re prime if you’re going to be it’s gonna be hard. I mean, obviously, we’re out and about with them. And so people know who they are, and they see them but by and large that has been respected and protected, so that they can get on with their lives. I do worry though, because our boy was 15 the other week, so he will let’s I’m assuming the election is next year, you know, either may or October, that he will be 16

His son coming into parliament 

And was fascinated. Came into some of the debates, sat in the debates. He knew more of our front benches than I thought. I mean, he recognised them. So he would say I’m not interest in politics. And he says, in very strong terms, I’m not going into politics. He’s decided, having watched me, that he’s not going to become a lawyer and he’s not going to become a politician. But it’s quite interesting that, deep down, he’s beginning to, sort of, explore those ideas. Our girl, slightly less, she’s only 12. So she’s just developing those ideas. And I wouldn’t thrust it on them. I mean, we’ve only got two rules for our kids, which is happy and confident. So we wouldn’t say they’ve got to go off to university, they’ve got to become this, that or the other. We genuinely just want them to be happy and confident.

On picking his desert Island Discs

I’ll tell you a very funny story about that because, obviously, what I tried to do was pick songs that meant something to me on the journey. So generally, for the first one, because reminded me of my mum.I went through classical music, you know, Northern Soul, I love Edwin Collins, that sort of thing. But I ended with Stormzy, with Bridge Over Troubled Water, which I think is a fantastic, a beautiful song. It was actually a Grenfell tribute song as well. And it’s beautiful. And our kids are quite into Stormzy, particularly our boy and so it was something that-

Cooking at home

I love cooking. I find it so relaxing and that just sounds really weird. And I’m not going to pretend I do it every night because I don’t. And Vic does most of the cooking during the week for the kids. I mean quite often I’m not having time for a meal anyway. But on a Saturday, I love it. So I’ve got a sort of routine of-

Working on the death penalty project

So, one of the things I did when I was a lawyer, was work with the death penalty project, which is a project based here in London to minimise and get rid of the death penalty across the world, particularly in the English speaking former colonies. So I did extensive cases in the Caribbean, probably went to the Caribbean about 50 times to represent people and to fight for people not to be harmed, so I’ve got closer than I wanted to be to that feeling. It’s death by hanging. Yeah. So I mean, and that’s very, you know, when you’re in the prisons in, you know, Jamaica, Trinidad, they’re not nice places, as you can imagine. Sitting in a dark cell with someone who is destined to be hung. It’s really, it’s incredible moment. And obviously, we’re fighting to save, normally, his life, the worse than women that we’ve represented in Uganda. But knowing that, in this legal case, if you get it right, this person will live. And if you don’t, and you don’t succeed, then in all likelihood they’ll be hung.

Football when he was younger 

I think the smell of cut grass takes me back to beginning to play grass football. And you know, going onto a pitch that’s been cut. So when I was probably the first time I went on a decent pitch was probably when I was about 10 playing in an under relevance League, where they cut the grass and it’s it’s that smell of fresh grass that’s just been cut, you do still get a football ground. Not so much because now the grasses have integrated a bit with other stuff. You don’t get the same cut smell. But that takes me back to sort of cycling around. Sorry. And Ken I played with the ken boys Lee,for a team there. And just walking on the pitch. I love I can’t tell you how joyful walking onto a pitcher’s for me. It’s just stepping onto the grass with a football be the Arsenal mascot. Oh, I’m not sure about that. We want to wish them luck.

On when the next election will be 

It’ll go at least into the early part of next year could go all the way through to the end of next year. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s up to the government, when they go, they’ll go at whatever point they think is best for them. There’s nothing we can do about that. And that’s just one of the prices of if you lose an election, you lose the right to say when the next election is, so we’ll be ready. Whatever it is.