Keir Starmer: 'If they're calling you boring - you're winning'

Keir Starmer looked a touch exasperated as I asked the question: "People say you come across as a bit boring - what do you say to that?"

"Well, if in the end that is the only bit of mud left to sling, then I'm pretty comfortable," he responds - raising his hands in frustration.

Mr Starmer describes attending a memorial for the former Chancellor Alistair Darling recently, saying: "He used to say - if they are calling you boring, you're winning." 

But as I follow him around the country - for ITV's Tonight programme - from backstage at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, to parliament for the King's speech, watching his beloved Arsenal, at a café in his north London constituency, and zipping around the country on trains - I press him on the question.

After all, it is a theme that emerges heavily in a focus group of a critical group of voters - those who backed the Tories in 2019 - that we commission from market research consultancy Savanta. 

At one point I ask if it matters - that people say they don't fancy having a pint with him. 

"I'd have a pint with them," he says, joking he'd need a bigger local pub.

But he adds that when people come up to him in the street "they don't say 'can you entertain me?' Tell me a joke. They say, do you understand what it's like for me? Do you know what choices I'm having to make and have you got a plan to do something about it." 

And that is at the heart of Starmer's pitch this year - that after the chaos, he offers a serious alternative.

And look - the focus group offered some hope for Labour on that - with some arguing, maybe it's time for a bit of stability.

Still, he knows that people want to get more personal with him and he was willing - during our time together - to open up more about his background and family.

I asked about his deputy Angela Rayner's claim that she "overshares" while he "undershares".

She's right, he told me, pointing to a difficult childhood in which his mum was terribly ill and he was often with her in intensive care.

It was intense, but "intensely private," he said. His father was devoted to his mum but more distant for a young Mr Starmer- working day and night and leaving little time for the children. 

I asked him if he'd ever talked to his father about that.

"No, no, no. There’s a lot of things I should've done."

"You wish you had?"

He replies: "Yep. But I didn't. I knew I needed to... But when he eventually went downhill, he went downhill quite quickly. And I didn't, I should have done. But out of that I’m determined to have a different relationship with my children."

He said it had led to a very different relationship with his children - as he insists on finishing work at 6pm every Friday to spend the evening with his family.

He said that the thing that keeps him up at night is worrying - not about big policy decisions - but about how he and his wife will protect their children if he does become PM. 

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But there is another challenge for Starmer - one that frustrates him even more - the claim that it isn't clear what it stands for.

He points to five policy speeches about his five missions, arguing that no Labour leader has ever set out so much detail in advance. 

But it's clear from my time with him that he has been on quite a political journey.

From the idealistic lefty who turned up at Leeds university in 1982 - with a "Boom Town Rats" album under one arm - and writing for the leftwing magazine Socialist Alternatives. 

In one magazine issue - that I showed to him - he argued that collective bargaining was not leftwing enough, and decried the authoritarian onslaught of Thatcherism. 

These days he's presenting himself as the fiscally responsibly centrist - who won't lift a two child benefit cap or raise tax, and who threw former leader Jeremy Corbyn out of the party over how he responded to an inquiry into anti-semitism in Labour.

And yet - just five years ago Starmer was crisscrossing the country to campaign for Corbyn. Hand on heart - I asked him - did he really want him to become prime minister?

"I didn't think the Labour Party was in a position to win the last election. I didn't obviously vote for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 or 2016. On the contrary, I resigned." 

I pressed him on the impact that his campaigning would have on public trust. 

"I thought that once that 2016 Brexit referendum had happened, I took the view that what then followed in the next few years was going to be felt for generations. And that I thought it was my responsibility to play a full part in that," claiming he only served in the capacity of shadow Brexit secretary. 

'Do you regret pushing for a second referendum on Brexit?'

At another time, when he visited a school in the Tory constituency of Reading West (one of 120 Labour need to win for a majority) I asked him- in footage not included in the film - if he regretted pushing for a second referendum. 

"No," he said. "Because we had reached as stage where there was a complete impasse in parliament. I didn't push for a second referendum in the early days after the Brexit vote."

He argued that had Theresa May reached out to the opposition, there could have been a Brexit deal Labour supported.

"But it was managed as an internal Tory party management issue. There was simply no way out by the time we got to the 2019 general election."

Starmer also responded to the now consistent attacks about his time as director for public prosecutions. 

"If they want to attack me for decisions when I was director of Public Prosecutions, we had 7000 staff, we made nearly a million decisions a year. Will there be mistakes there? Of course there will, but there’ll be no smoking gun, no skeletons in the closet."

And so that was the Labour leader. Next up, I'm also following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. 

Keir Starmer - Up close is on ITV1 and ITVX tonight at 8.30pm 

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