Rodney Starmer was a toolmaker who was “totally committed” to caring for Keir’s mother Josephine, who lived with Still’s disease, a rare and debilitating illness.
When Starmer began discussing his father in conversations with Obama, “Barack just came alive,” Lammy told Baldwin. The former president’s “Dreams from My Father” bestseller from 1995, in which he discussed his relationship with his largely absent father, accelerated Obama’s political rise.
On hearing Starmer speak about his own paternal relationship, Obama began “interrogating Keir further,” Lammy said, believing that the story could become the “architecture for a genuine campaign” based on the sense that working people were being overlooked by the political classes.
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Before Obama’s intervention Starmer had seemed reluctant to discuss his father, describing him only as a “difficult man, a complicated man,” who “kept himself to himself,” his son said in a 2020 interview.
But at the start of 2022, the Labour leader began to open up, with a speech outlining his vision of a new “contract” with the British people based on “security, prosperity and respect.”
“My dad always felt undervalued because he worked in a factory. He felt people looked down on him, and he wasn’t wrong about that,” Starmer said.
