The biography of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, published shortly before he led Labour to its massive General Election victory on July 4, reveals the Christianity in his background.
The writer of Keir Starmer, The Biography is Tom Baldwin, a national newspaper journalist and former communications director for the Labour Party. He recounts how Starmer’s late mother Jo, who died in 2015, was an everyday member of St John’s Hurst Green, a village near Oxted in Surrey.
Jo Starmer, a nurse and mother of 4 children, endured life-long health problems with extraordinary courage. She continued going to her local Church of England parish church after she had her leg amputated due to an accident within the Lake District in 2008.
Baldwin describes how Starmer’s late father, Rod, a professing atheist like his son, took her to church in her wheelchair: “Each Sunday Rod would wheel Jo into church, before sitting outside until the ‘religious mumbo-jumbo’ was over, then complain to a number of the other congregants about how they’d parked their cars on the pavement and made his job of getting the wheelchair in tougher.”
The book reveals that “one in every of Starmer’s regrets is that his children never got to know her or feel the love she had given him”. Starmer is quoted describing his mother’s response after she fell over at a road junction, with the family dog, while meeting him and his sister on their way home from primary school. Unable to rise up as a consequence of the impact of Still’s disease on her joints and ligaments, she needed to be helped onto her feet by a passing motorist.
“Mum was never one to make a fuss. When she was back on her feet, she joked about what had happened, paid numerous attention to the dog, and took us home,” Starmer recalled.
Baldwin includes an interview with Shaun Fenton, the headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, which Starmer attended within the Seventies. It is now a personal school and is about to be severely hit by Labour’s plan to remove private schools’ exemption from paying VAT on their fees.
Fenton is quoted as saying: “Keir will remember having to sing our faculty song at assemblies, ‘To Be a Pilgrim’, which is all about happening a special journey with a purpose. My advice to him is to go on and be a pilgrim and do good on the earth.”
The hymn, based on words by John Bunyan, the 17th Century Puritan writer of the Christian classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, states in its opening verse: “He who would valiant be ‘gainst all disaster, let him in constancy follow the Master. There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.”
It concludes with a call to courageous Christian discipleship: “Since, Lord, Thou dost defend us with Thy Spirit, we all know we at the top shall life inherit. Then, fancies, flee away! I’ll fear not what men say, I’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim.”
In an article for The Spectator on July 6, Dan Hitchens, a former editor of The Catholic Herald, asked: “Does Keir Starmer’s atheism matter?”
Hitchens argued that what he termed “Starmer’s insensitivity to religion” might well matter: “Take his policy of introducing VAT on school fees. Eton and Harrow can take it. But what concerning the Christian, Muslim and Jewish institutions with attendances below 300 and costs of, say, £6,000 a yr, which run on goodwill and prayer?”
Hitchens also cited Labour’s plan to ban conversion therapy “abandoned by the Tories partly because every way of framing it was an obvious threat to spiritual freedom”.
He quoted the Evangelical Alliance’s warning that an expansive ban “would place church leaders prone to prosecution after they preach on biblical texts referring to marriage and sexuality” and will “criminalise a member of a church who prays with one other member after they ask for prayer to withstand temptation”.Â
“Labour’s manifesto guarantees to institute a ban, without explaining how they’d avoid putting traditional religious believers on the unsuitable side of the law,” Hitchens wrote.
So, there may be considerable irony within the undeniable fact that Starmer used to sing Bunyan’s hymn frequently as a faculty boy. Unless Labour relents on its plan to impose arguably probably the most draconian restriction on British religious liberty for the reason that 17th Century, orthodox Christians who hold to the Church’s traditional sexual ethic are more likely to need just the type of spiritual and moral courage that To Be a Pilgrim calls for.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
