Keir Starmer talks movingly of his father’s death in new biography

‘Dad was proud of me and loved me, even if he couldn’t tell me to my face’

Sir Keir Starmer has spoken movingly of his father’s death in a new biography of the would-be prime minister.

The Labour leader has previously talked of how his relationship with his toolmaker father, Rodney, was more “distant” as he cared for his mother, Josephine, who suffered with a rare illness.

His mother, an NHS nurse, died just weeks before he became an MP in 2015, while his father passed away three years later.

While helping to clear out his father’s house, he found a scrapbook filled with cuttings about him when he was younger, then as a lawyer and again as a politician.

The book had been made by his father, who wrote dates underneath the cuttings, but which had been hidden at the back of a cupboard.

Soon afterwards he said he remembered his father saying he was proud of him only once.

That prompted a family friend, Mary Seller, to write to him.

Starmer says in the new book: “Mary told me something I didn’t know: Dad was proud of me and loved me, even if he couldn’t tell me to my face.

“And it’s now too late for me to tell him to his face that I was proud of him, that I loved him too.”

In the book he also recalls when Rodney was dying: “I could tell there was something different about him: he was giving up. I understood too how any chance Dad and I might have had to speak properly — to sort everything out — had gone. We hadn’t hugged each other for years. Not since I was a kid. I thought about trying to put my arms around him in that hospital room but, no, it wasn’t what we did.”

Instead, he walked away: “I knew he was dying and I didn’t turn around to go back and tell him what I thought. And I should have done.”

After his death, Starmer found a scrapbook created by his father that featured cuttings of the toolmaker’s son (PA Wire)

In Keir Starmer: The Biography, by Tom Baldwin, he also spoke for the first time about the “tough life” of his younger brother who suffers from learning disabilities and reveals he got into fights in order to protect him after he was called “thick” or “stupid” by other children.

Mr Starmer was challenged this week about what he was working on personally as he looks to become the next prime minister.

He told BBC Breakfast he was working to “be the best leader I can be … in difficult circumstances”.

It follows a tough fortnight for Sir Keir in which his party U-turned on plans to spend £28bn on green projects in government, and he was forced to drop Rochdale by-election candidate Azhar Ali, after it emerged he had suggested Israel allowed the 7 October attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people.

But there was success on Friday when Labour defeated the Conservatives in two by-elections. Sir Keir said the results showed the country was “crying out” for change.