British Prime Minister biographer Tom Baldwin has compared Keir Starmer to England football coach Gareth Southgate because of his lack of charisma despite recent notable successes.
Baldwin matched Starmer’s victory as Labor leader in the general election on 4 July, a day after England qualified for the finals of the European Football Championship, defeating the Netherlands 2–1.
“Practice leadership, often criticized as too cautious or unmotivated, has had very good results in recent days,” he summarized at a press conference in London today.
The journalist also noted Starmer’s political rivals, pundits and voters as “boring” and Southgate’s commentators’ criticism of the England team’s poor performances.
The author of the book “Keir Starmer – The Biography” said that neither Starmer nor Southgate were exhibitionists and that “both have always been criticized by those who want both politics and football to be too dramatic, too spectacular”.
The British journalist insisted that the comparison works because the Labor leader is “so obsessed” with his passion for football that, unlike other politicians who pretend to love the sport, he “normalises” it by playing it regularly.
“He’s a very private person,” Baldwin admits, but when the club starmer backs up scores at the last minute, “he screams heartlessly.”
The prime minister told public broadcaster BBC today that he had taken advantage of a break in meetings during the NATO summit to watch Wednesday’s semi-final, which is expected to see Sunday’s final in Berlin.
However, he resisted calling for a national holiday to celebrate a possible victory for fear of “bad luck”.
On 11 July 2021, England lost the Euro2020 final against Italy on penalties at Wembley Stadium.
“I don’t want to go through that again, so I don’t want to tease anybody. We have to mark it in some way, but most importantly we have to win on Sunday,” he told the BBC.
According to Baldwin, Starmer believes in the community spirit represented by football clubs across the United Kingdom, which is why he made it a point to visit a dozen during the election campaign.
As for leadership, the biographer revealed that the current prime minister spoke to coaches Arsene Wenger, Mikel Arteta and Gareth Southgate “about how to manage a team, keep them happy and improve their performance”.
However, the difference between politics and football is that football can show results in the short and medium term, while in politics people take some time to realize the effects of long-term actions.
“I think there is tension in Keir Starmer’s government on this aspect, to achieve economic growth”, which will allow it to achieve “the long-term objectives of training, infrastructure, industrial strategy”, the journalist said.
He added that both Labor and a Labor government “need to find ways to deliver benefits to people in real life, and not just on some sort of statistical paper”.
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