Voices: Keir Starmer was going to quit as a failure three years ago – now he is on course for No 10
That a politician thought about resigning but decided not to is perhaps not the most important news story. But it is one of the episodes in Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer that attracted attention.
After the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, when the government gained the seat from the opposition, “Keir kept saying that he felt he would have to go, that the result showed the party was going backwards and he saw it as a personal rejection,” Baldwin quotes an aide as saying.
It was the , as trailed the Tories by 10 points in the national opinion polls. Labour’s support, which rose when he became leader a year before, fell back to where it was under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election. Boris Johnson was relatively popular, buoyed by the success of the coronavirus vaccine. Local Tories celebrated the by-election win by inflating a large model of the prime minister outside the count.
