The day Keir Starmer cried on me about his childhood

I have had a good idea. It may even be an important idea. See what you think. The other day I interviewed Keir Starmer for my weekly podcast, Rosebud. It’s so called because of the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Rosebud, you will recall, was the trade name of the sledge on which Kane, as a boy, was playing the day he was taken away from his home and his mother. My podcast is about the early memories of people in the public eye. I wanted to talk to Sir Keir because he aspires to be prime minister and I didn’t know much about him. We met at St George’s Park, the FA’s national football centre, near Burton upon Trent. He had had a full morning, chairing a shadow cabinet meeting, giving soundbites about football and avoiding giving soundbites about Angela Rayner. He came in, smiling but a little weary; he sat down and, for 40 minutes, we chatted.

I always start with my guest’s first memory. Sometimes it’s a moment of trauma (Nicola Sturgeon as a toddler falling down the stairs); occasionally it’s wonderfully Freudian (Rupert Everett as a baby being sprayed with a fantastically phallic garden hose). For Keir the toddler, it was the day the family’s long-anticipated Ford Cortina arrived. Starmer told me about his mother, a victim of Still’s disease, an incurable condition that causes painful swelling of the joints and organs, and how his father’s devotion to her kept him emotionally distant from his children. He had tears in his eyes for much of our conversation and when I asked him for his first recollection of profound sadness, he cried. The whole conversation gave me a flavour of the man. At the end when we stood up, we hugged. It wasn’t contrived. I did not feel I was being conned.