Keir Starmer: Getting Personal with the New Prime Minister

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. Being leader of the Labour Party or leader of the opposition is a bit like being the England manager, where everybody can do your job better than you. Everybody's got an opinion on your job that you should be doing. I wouldn't have played him at left back, or I don't know what that's all about. I know what difficult decisions are, and I know they have to be taken. You cannot have a situation where you say, well, that's too difficult, I'm going to walk away from it.

0:30That isn't leadership. I didn't grow up thinking I would be or particularly wanting to be an MP it's not about Keir Starmer walking through the door number 10 push to one side what you can push to one side focus on what you're trying to achieve and remember it isn't about you because when you're being subject to that kind of criticism it feels very personal I don't regret very much in life but the last time I saw my dad he was in hospital died and I walked away. And I knew he was going to die and I didn't turn around and go back and tell him what I thought and I should have died.

1:18That is Sir Keir Starmer and this is High Performance, the show that unlocks the minds of the most fascinating people on the planet. Look, on this show, we are proudly apolitical. This show isn't about us sharing our opinion with you. This is about you listening to the opinions, the views and the mindsets of some of the most fascinating people in the world, many of them leaders. And if we're going to be led by someone, I think that even if we don't agree with the things they sometimes say, just burying our head in the sand or closing off our ears or our minds to the things that they want to tell us doesn't further anyone's cause.

1:53So all I would say for this episode is open your ears, your eyes and your mind and just listen to a leader, the leader of the Labour Party and the new British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. I'm Jake Humphrey and alongside our expert Damien Hughes, this show is all about learning from the likes of Sir Keir, from their stories, their struggles and their successes, so you can get closer to your own version of high performance. So before this episode where we sat down with Sir Keir a few months ago and reflected on the life that he's lived and the person that he is today, Here are a few quick messages from our valued partners who allow us to offer you this totally for free.

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4:04Well, Kia, welcome to High Performance. Thank you very much. Let's just be sort of really clear at the top what this is about. This is a conversation about a person, right? Not a political conversation, no talk about policy, no point scoring, nothing like that. We're not in Westminster now. This sounds very good. This is just the truth, really, about who you are, where you've come from, and where you would one day love to be. Does that sound okay? That sounds good. Good. So to that end, I read an interview recently, actually, with your deputy, Angela Rayner, and she said she overshares, but Kia undershares.

4:37So first of all, how do you feel having a conversation like this? I'm getting used to it. It's the sort of thing that I felt very uncomfortable about, if I'm honest, a few years ago. So I do think it's really interesting to explore more where people come from. And, you know, I think some of the things that Angela said about oversharing and undersharing are just a fascinating insight into different personalities. Why do you think you sort of struggled with it early on? Because I've never spent my life sort of analysing what happened when I grew up, what I felt about it. I'm asked now much more about my mum and dad than I ever was in other jobs that I've done.

5:18and I've always been sort of very focused on an outcome you know what am I trying to achieve where's the goal how do we get to that goal rather than having that conversation with myself about what does this all mean I think Angela was spot on by the way it was such an interesting observation it was very Angela observation she's got brilliant antennae about her oversharing and me undersharing and sort of holding quite a lot back inside me and I think if you hold quite a locked back inside you. You don't particularly want to do podcasts like this. Right. Well, we're going to delve deep today. Let's start the podcast with the way that we always do.

5:57In your mind, what is high performance? I think high performance for me is about outcomes. It's about whether you can achieve that outcome, usually difficult outcomes. And that is high performance. I think it's probably changed over the years i mean i obviously came through being a lawyer then ran a public service now into politics so it changes but it's definitely outcomes focused for me i mean what i would say just to qualify that and it's not really what a difference to what i think is important in terms of high performance what i've learned along the road as it were is you can achieve the same things in different ways so i think there's a point in our lives where we think the only way to achieve something is to behave in this way or to be focused in that way.

6:49The more I've seen people lead teams, the less convinced I am about that. I think you can achieve the same things in different ways, different styles. The other thing I'd say is, I think high performance is different in different places. It depends what people are doing. My sister, for example, is a care worker. That's a high performance job in a completely different way. So for me, it's about outcomes. I think that reflects the job I'm doing rather than a fixed view on what high performance is. So given the different roles that you've had in your career, Keir, from being a lawyer to leading a public service to now being the head of a political party, what are the changes that you've incorporated along those different roles that still allow you to get to those outcomes?

7:35I think one of the biggest changes for me has been the scale. So to give you an example, when I started as a lawyer, I was a barrister, therefore an advocate. So you're pretty much on your own with quite a small team that you would put together for the purpose of a particular case. You'd be arguing a case on behalf of somebody. You probably have a team of maybe three or four people totally focused on that case. The team only stayed together for the purpose of that case. It broke up afterwards because you go on to a different case. so it's relatively small scale very very focused only one outcome that matters which is the particular case you're doing nothing broader than that i then moved on to sort of if you like strategic litigation which is instead of doing each case one by one can't we sort of tackle an issue in a bigger way and form bigger teams but i'd say that there were two or three turning points really important developments for me the first was um having gone from sort of individual cases to strategic cases.

8:37One of the strategic cases we did, for example, was challenging the death penalty in other countries around the world. But then I went to work in Northern Ireland on implementing some of the Good Friday Agreement proposals, which were, in my case, about changing the police, the RUC, the Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, into the police service of Northern Ireland. So this was the idea that a different police service was going to emerge after the Good Friday Agreement that would be much more transparent, human rights compliant, etc. And up until that point in my life, I'd been the individual lawyer sort of railing against the system from the outside.

9:16And this was my first opportunity to work with the police and the policing board, changing from the inside. And that was a really insight. How do you affect change, a different kind of leadership altogether from the inside, because then you've got to get people on your side. You've got to influence them, change the way they think, and change, in that case, the nature of the police service in Northern Ireland. After that, I became director of public prosecutions and headed up the Crown Prosecution Service. And I had, you know, seven or eight thousand staff. Now, that's a big thing when you're used to having a team of four or five.

9:49And suddenly, I had to think, well, how do you influence someone on the this was we had about 100 offices across england and wales how do i influence what somebody does the other side of the country what are the leadership behaviors that have to change in order to do that so i think there were big changes along the way and then dive into what they are before we move to the next one well i think the the first which was working with the police service in northern ireland is yeah how how do you operate in such a way that you can uh make sure people have trust and confidence in what you're doing in such a way that they will want to change the organisation in which we're all working.

10:25That is a very different skill to arguing a case in court. And then this question of how do you affect change on a scale, which was something which I hadn't done before. Were you bringing in the change, or were you trying to get them to suggest what the changes should be? What was the...? A bit of both. Take the Crown Prosecution Service. I knew it had to change, and I wanted it to be much more open and transparent, and that when we were taking decisions, we would explain them. So to give you an example of what I mean by that, some of the most difficult decisions were in areas which were, people had very strong and different views.

11:04So for example, assisted suicide. One of the first cases that landed on my desk was a case of the mother of a person called Dan James. Dan was a fantastic rugby player. And And he was up at Loughborough and he was on the verge of getting into the England team when a scrum collapsed on him on a rainy Saturday afternoon. And he was very, very badly injured, paralyzed from the neck down. And was at Stoke Mandeville for a while, but never recovered and got more and more depressed, didn't want to live, didn't want to live. and his mum would fight with him about that, as you can imagine. But in the end, he decided to take his own life by going to Dignitas and his mum went with him.

11:56And when she got back, she was arrested for assisted suicide. And this came across my desk as director of public prosecution and I took the view that it wasn't in the public interest for her to be prosecuted for assisting in his suicide in the particular circumstances. Once I'd made that decision, I realised we had to go further than that, which was to open up the whole decision making around assisted suicide to the public so people could have confidence in what we were doing so i wanted to bring change and amongst the change i wanted at the crown prosecution service was that the more i felt stronger the more we showed our workings the more people have confidence in what we're doing and learning how you do that across an organization was really important to me but it is a two-way process because the other thing i learned at the Crown Prosecution Service and it stayed with me is if you really want to know how to fix the things in the organisation that aren't working, ask your staff and ask your junior staff.

12:51We had these hundred or so offices across England and Wales and I'd visit each of them quite regularly at least once a year. I'd try to get to once every other year so I'd do about 50 a year go out to these offices and whatever the programme was for the day the first thing I'd do is say can I just have 20 minutes on my own with the most junior staff with no supervisors in the room and it was so insightful and i asked um them two questions routinely the first was what's the biggest problem challenge that you've got every day you do your job and what's the workaround and the second equally instructive i thought was when's the last time your manager said thank you to you brilliant and it was such an insight into how you manage people how you lead people what is it that you felt those two questions gave you as information as a leader of the cps well the first question which is what's the problem and how you're going to fix it is a real insight into what's going wrong and what what's the way i'm a big believer in fixing things particularly now i'm in politics um what i can't stand is people who describe a problem very very well and there are lots of people can do that in politics everybody does it all the time here's the problem here's the problem you can have eloquent speeches about what the problem is and i want to know what's the solution well how do you fix this thing i mean in politics it's it's the missing bit most of the time and i got that from the staff because they they would if you're there's something in the offices isn't working properly and it's not working every day in the end you find a way to fix it you find something a way to work around the problem and so there's the what's the problem how do we fix it was a really important part of my learning from that the saying thank you was a real sense of how you value all members of the team if you've got members of the team who are not even being thanked for the job they're doing then you haven't got a very high performing team in my view because in the end if people don't feel that their contribution is acknowledged, then the likelihood that they're going to, you know, muck in and be high performing is pretty low.

15:05So there's quite a lot to learn from that. I'm really interested in the fact that, you know, you clearly want to deeply understand people. You want to deeply understand problems. And you also, I guess, realise that, you know, things are nuanced. It's not this and that, black and white, A and B, right? Yet we live in a world where politics is totally not nuanced at all. It is more polarizing than ever before. So with all of your sort of natural instinct from having impact and driving change, how do you feel about, you know, the kind of school playground type prime minister's questions or going on like TV, political TV shows or news programs where it sometimes feels like the only aim for the journalist is to do a kind of gotcha, catch you out kind of moment, you know, like how much is a pint of milk type questions.

15:57How does the modern political world sit with your kind of deep desire to actually have genuine impact for the right reasons? I really hate that side of politics. Do we have to have it? Our system is set up as an adversarial system, if you like. Even the layout of the House of Commons, if you think about it, it's a sort of rectangular shape. On one side, you've got all the benches of the government. On the other side, you've got all the benches of the opposition. So you're both staring at each other across a divide. If you stand at the dispatch box speaking in Parliament, it is a very interesting experience.

16:32It's obvious once I've said it, but until I did it, I didn't quite appreciate it. the moment you stand up at the dispatch box, almost every friendly face is now behind you. And you've got a wall of faces that are going to vehemently disagree with what you're saying. And it's a very, very tribal, divided way of doing things. There are other chambers, you know, other parliaments around the world that are horseshoe shaped to avoid that. I have to say, coming in from outside of politics, I didn't come into politics till later in life when I'd done other things. I don't find it at all comfortable. I don't think it achieves very much.

17:07The best part of the week for me is when Prime Minister's Questions is over and I can get out of Parliament across the country. I was in Scotland earlier this week. That would be typical to go straight out to see what is happening actually in the world outside of Parliament. Because my strong belief is outside of politics, if there is a problem in an organisation, a team, something which you're leading, the instinct when something goes wrong or there's a problem to fix is to get people around the table and say, right, you know, what's the problem? How do we fix it? What's people's views on this?

17:43And let's move forward. In politics, the instinct is to say, we've got all the answers. They've got none of the answers. Under us, everything be fine. Under them, everything's terrible. And I don't think it actually is a good way of driving forward the sort of change that we need it also it leads to a sort of short-term thinking so instead of recognizing that some things are going to take quite a long time to fix there's this sort of sense that you can do everything within a five-year political cycle and most of the time the problems that we're actually confronting are going to take longer than even when you're building teams now i mean you know it's different if someone's an mp because you don't decide who is or isn't but when you're deciding who is in your shadow cabinet who do you want to work closely with, but actually who are the non-MP members of staff that you're going to work with?

18:29Who do you want to hire? What are the questions you ask? What are the things that you look for? Who do you want around you? The people I want around me are people that can come to really sound judgments and I can totally trust them. One of my weaknesses, I guess, is getting to that point where I can trust someone's judgment. I think that when I first start working with someone, it takes a while until I trust their judgment. And therefore, the relationship is one where I'm slightly questioning, well, what's that about? You know, just walk me through that. Tell me the thinking behind this. And I'm sort of testing it, which must be quite hard.

19:06But once it gets to a point where I think this person knows what they're talking about, I trust their judgment, then it clicks into a much better place. But you can't trust them on one interview or, you know, one half-hour conversation before you hire them. So what are the things you ask to kind of think that person's got eventually what you want from them. So asking for an example of something they've done is always very good. Asking them what their detractors would say about them is always really, really interesting in terms of people's real self-awareness. I can't stand bullshitters. And trying to get to that point in an interview or get to that point quickly is really important for me.

19:44Can I try a Keir Starmer question out on you? Yep. What would your detractors say about you? Firstly, they might say it takes too long to get to a position of trust with people. and I can see that's really irritating. I'm trying to avoid what a lot of people do, which is to say, oh, they'd say I was too hard working or something. You know, have people always turning around. I would actually go with Angela Rayner's observation of undersharing. I think she's right about that. And I think that sometimes that can lead to members of the team thinking, you don't care enough. You're not showing enough emotion about this particular issue.

20:22her observation I think I've reflected on that quite a lot because I think I think she's probably right about that yeah and that's an interesting one because that's an observation from someone that actually knows you yeah so I think even when they're wrong I think we can be more accepting of observations from people who know us care about us and want the best for us where it gets really difficult is when the observations don't come from those people they come from people with a with an agenda. And we know the way it works in this country with politics and opposition parties and the media and the public and social media and, you know, aggression online.

20:58And I'm not interested in the political angle to this. I'm really interested in the human angle to this. I wouldn't say you're an extrovert, right? No. So to put yourself out in the world like you do and to get the scrutiny and at times the criticism that you do, would you be happy to share with us actually how it really feels to be subjected to the scrutiny, the criticism, the polarized opinions, and I guess at times the sense of unfairness that perhaps all politicians on every party at times feel. Yes, I do. And let's not make it party political, because I think it is for politicians across the board.

21:37Because it's a funny old business. I mean, I often say to people being leader of the Labour Party or leader of the opposition is a bit like being the England manager where everybody can do your job better than you. Everybody's got an opinion on your job that you should be doing. I wouldn't have played him at left back or don't know what that's all about. My job is very much like this now. Everybody thinks they could do a better job and is very happy to give advice. And there are ups and downs when things are going well, that sort of goes down a bit, if I'm honest. And then when they're not going so well, the heat is really really on and it's really hard when you've got lots of people saying pretty you know negative stuff about what you're trying to do and somehow you have to shut it out how i think you just for me it's about um i'm giving this almost like blinkering it so being really clear what am i trying to achieve what is the goal let me just focus on that and push the rest of it out it's hard to do it's really really hard to do and then there's the sheer resilience of just getting back up um and do it you know when when you're having a bad time everybody's on you um and there's a lot of noises off just getting back up and doing it again can be really tough what's been the hardest moment in the journey so far where i mean i where you've really thought is this worth what I have to put myself through?

23:06Since I've been leader of the Labour Party, it was 2021 when we'd just lost Hartlepool badly. That really hurt as a team. It was, you know, I'd been leader for just over a year. Things were beginning to go in the right direction and suddenly we had this major setback and it was like being punched in the stomach. After the event, I now think it's good that it hurt. It didn't feel too good at the time. But you only hurt if you were so determined to have won. But that was really hard. And, you know, we had, I don't know, 20 journalists and photographers outside our front door all of the time for days on end.

23:48And so it feels like you can't get away from it, even in your own home. You're sort of indoors, but the moment you step out, there's cameras, there's people, you know, wanting to ask you questions. and you know we've got relatively young kids and that sense of there's nowhere to get away from this now i found it very hard i think a lot of politicians would have found it hard and how you just shut that out as best you can and plow on even though you know lots of people are being pretty disparaging and how do you do that like we had i'm thinking like the way you described being feeling like you've been punched when we spoke to Tyson Fury on this podcast he spoke around where his brain goes to when he's been hurt and he and he he thinks of all the occasions where he's been hurt in the past and how almost the evidence builds confidence that I can come back from this how do you do it mentally to be able to keep going and keep forging ahead firstly i think i um sort of go in on myself and almost a protective crouch absorb it into myself and then begin the process of shutting out what i can shut out reminding myself what it is i'm trying to achieve and therefore that i've got to overcome this there's a very important part for me as well which is reminding myself that what i'm trying to achieve is not about me and this is it's always hard to get this over i didn't grow up thinking i would be or particularly wanting to be an mp because something in my head it was a working class background my dad worked in a factory my mom was a nurse and there was an inhibitor in there somewhere that was saying this isn't a job that someone like you is going to do kia and therefore i didn't have this lifelong dream of being leader of the labor party or being prime minister and therefore I desperately want us to win the next general election because I know what we can do if we do win that general election but that is about having a Labour government which will change the country for the better for millions of people it's not about Keir Starmer walking through the door number 10 and that I don't know whether that makes any sense at all and therefore this isn't so that one day there will be an image of me at number 10 it's because we need a Labour government and I have to remind myself of that when i'm in that position to get out of it again which is right take the heat absorb it push to one side what you can push to one side focus on what you're trying to achieve and remember it isn't about you because when you're being subject to that kind of criticism it feels very personal and so it's it's it's that and then something works for me my mum was very very ill all of her life really ill she had stills disease which is a disease that attacks your immune system when you're 11 and then she had steroids when she was a teenager which helped with the stills disease but caused all sorts of awful problems later in life so there came a point in which she couldn't walk she couldn't properly use her hands she had to have her leg amputated and she was in and out of hospital a lot in very very very serious situations so um i've been in intensive care and high dependency units with my mum many many many times when it's been touch and go and she had this amazing courage and determination she would never moan even if you asked her in a sort of almost life and death situation how are you she'd always say i'm all right how are you and she would always get back up somehow she would get back up and get back to her feet in the most impossible circumstances where sometimes when I looked at her in the high dependency unit, I couldn't see how she could ever get up again.

27:46And interestingly, towards the end of her life, when she couldn't get back up again, it in the end, it destroyed her. And so when I'm in that moment, I just, there's a bit of me that thinks if my mum can get up, I can get up. Whatever the criticism, that's not the same as a life and death situation where my mum got back up. And so there's a long answer to a question which is there are complicated things that I think happen that give you a sort of resilience to get through a difficult set of circumstances. They're the very low moments in politics. There are many other times when it's simply not that bad.

28:25And the additional factor now is we've got children and how do I protect them through this is something I do worry about. can we explore the relationship with your mum though because as you're describing what sounds like a pretty harrowing and and and troubling experience of being in those high dependency units i'm reminded of i remember reading many years ago jeremy paxton wrote a book about our prime ministers and one of the trends that he spotted about them was that many of them had experienced childhood difficulties some had lost parents at a young age some had had parents that had maybe had illnesses like yours those experiences form you they form your views your beliefs your judgments what did that do for you seeing your mum struggle like that the first thing is I say I agree with you that those things do influence um how you are if I'm honest with myself I've only come laterally to understand quite how they've influenced me and I think to some extent I'm still coming to terms with how they've influenced me.

29:30And I speak about my mum and my dad here. My mum, as I've described, very ill, but incredibly courageous and determined, warm, loving, and always there for others, not moaning about herself, was an incredible example, an incredible example. That's given me a determination like nothing on earth. nothing will get in the way of what we have to achieve you know that being absolutely clear-eyed and focused on what is it for my mum which was i'm going to get through this situation i'm going to get up and for her i'm going to walk again i'm going to where do you think her incredible strength it was deep deep deep in her um in her being this sense that i think it's probably although i don't know being told as an 11 year old or just past 11 she was told by the time he's 20 you won't walk and you definitely won't have kids i've never talked this through with her and obviously i can't now but i've just imagined that it triggered something in her that something in her no way um and then it kept and the steroids actually because she but for the steroids she probably wouldn't have been walking and i'm not sure whether she would have had kids but it gave her that opportunity and so that really drove her because my mom was so dependent physically on help the relationship between her and my dad was very intense he was an incredible man he was totally devoted and committed to her um learned everything about every aspect of her illness when she was in hospital he would be there the whole time he would you know sleep on any bench in the corridor of the hospital whatever he wouldn't leave the hospital until she was coming home incredibly dedicated and everything was premised on mum and how we'd get mum through and these are things i'm thinking through more now to be honest because i reflect a lot of my relationship with my dad in recent years more than i probably did in the previous 20 years before that and um not so much when he was alive gave me this incredible sense of duty and loyalty because he was just his duty was to look after my mum you know it was like the vow he took when he got married was just seared through him it was his duty to do it to be there to absolutely be there and he kept her alive on a number of occasions because he knew exactly what was going on and what exactly to do so that duty um commitment i think and again i'm piecing this together i'm not pretending to be an expert on this but that thing that angela said about undersharing where did that come from a bit of me thinks it was because the intensity of that relationship about my mom's illness was such that there wasn't much emotional space for much else in our household it was quite a small household quite tightly in and i don't know there was the emotional space for us to perhaps express ourselves in the way we might otherwise have done because everything was quite intense around making sure mom was right and i think that's obviously had an effect on me maybe holding things in that i if i was andrew i'd probably share more and the other thing that is again i've reflected on much much more in recent years is and now i think i understand better is that my dad worked in a factory so is working on the factory floor um which is tough really tough um physical work but he was skilled as a tool maker highly skilled but he felt all his life disrespected i could tell the conversation he hated was the conversation with people sort of standing around with a coffee or a drink and saying well what do you do for a living and someone say well i i'm a civil servant i'm a teacher what do you do i work in a factory and there'd be a moment of quiet when he said that and then the conversation move on and and that moment for him i think made him feel really disrespected and looked down that he felt people look down on him and i think he's probably right and for me one of the reasons that respect is so important is that short period of silence that used to follow my dad saying what he did for a living.

34:05And that's made me, it's bound together, my mum's sort of determination, with that sense of injustice that everybody should have respect and dignity. But so much of what you're saying, Kate, as we're listening to it, that ties in with the fact that you've gone as the most junior member. Has anyone said thank you to you and things like that? I'm interested in why has it taken you so long to do this reflection that you can see the pieces of it that predate it? I don't know is the true answer to that. But as I reflect on that, I think it's because my sort of focus on outcomes, I've got to achieve this.

34:47I've got to win this case. I've got to do this. I've got to make sure that if we go into court, we've got to be fully prepared. I've got to get absolutely everything right because I have a duty to the person that I'm representing to make sure that if we possibly can, we win their case. So it's very outcome, outcome, outcome. So I'm sort of running towards the outcome the whole time, almost not wanting to or thinking that I need to reflect on what's the hard wiring here that's making you do this. I never set out on this path. I didn't know what a lawyer was, particularly when I went to Leeds to study law.

35:23I'd never met a lawyer. I was first in my family to go to university. Didn't know what a lawyer was. Sort of ploughed on towards the goal. Then through the cases, then through more strategic litigation into Northern Ireland and the Crown Prosecution Service. And into politics, the same thing, which is a deep sense, having worked five years running the prosecution service, that I can't bring about the change I need to bring about unless I get on to a bigger stage, which is politics, where there are better ways of bringing around a bigger outcome. And whether this was my mum or not, I don't know, but running towards the goal meant I never reflected on the journey.

36:04So the questions you're asking me, this is not a conversation I would have been having 10 years ago.

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38:16When did your parents pass away? So my mum passed away in 2015, just a few weeks before I was elected as an MP, which was really sad. And then my dad passed away in 2018. You know, you've said you're a different person now to the person who, particularly when your mum was still alive, You know, in 2015, the person that would have maybe had different conversations then, we always ask at the end, you know, what advice would you give a teenage Kea? I'm interested what you would want to say to your mum and dad if they were still here and they were able to hear you talking in this new kind of reflective, open and honest way.

38:59I think my mum knew what I thought of her. And was a very warm woman. It's taken me much longer to work out my relationship with my dad. Because he was by nature more distant. And so bound up with how he looked after my mum. And almost to retreat from the social scene because he didn't like that question, what do you do for a living? that it was never that, it didn't feel close.

39:41And I don't regret very much in life.

39:48But the last time I saw my dad, he was in hospital, died. And I walked away. And I knew he was going to die, just knew it. I knew I wouldn't see him again.

40:05and I didn't turn around to go back and tell him what I thought.

40:13And I shoot it out. And that, you know, is this advice for my teenage self? I don't know. It's hardwired advice for myself in relation to my relationship with our children. So I've tried to make sure that is completely different and that we are together, we talk and we know each other. If you had a turn back, what would you have said to your dad?

40:41I would have said I love you. I'd have also said I'm proud of you. I'd have tried to close that gap

40:53that was so important to him in his life.

40:58You probably knew that already. I would imagine. I hope so. It's so interesting, isn't it, having these types of conversations because I think life moves at such a pace. I mean, the life you've lived especially moves at such a pace, but I think it's only often when we stop and we realise that the great moments, the hard moments, the relationships, the things that were left unsaid, they're all such an important part of where we're at and how we live, you know? i agree and i think one of the hardest things in a job warrior in the public domain is that public private getting the balance right is very important and say for example i'm very insistent that we will always stop work at six o 'clock on a friday and i will spend time with vick my wife and our children you know most of the time arguing about what takeaway we're going to get to get them off the ipads i get all that but it's just i don't want to be that bloke in 10 years says i wish i'd spent more time with my children if you want to spend more time with your children spend more time with your children um and so there's that bit of the public private which is really hard to get right but i'm determined i actually people think that it's a sign of strong leadership or that it's busy leadership that if you can say my diary is so full i can't see my wife and children that is somehow a description of a good leader i don't think so yeah um but the more intense moments are the more difficult ones and just to give you where you're the struggle with the public life and the private life really becomes quite acute so when we had the leadership race for the labor party my wife's mom had an awful accident and died and as you can imagine and Vic, my wife, was in utter bits.

42:52And I found that really hard because I was trying to reach her. This was, in many ways for me, I'd lost my own parents, but to try to reach someone who was losing and lost hers was really hard. And to go from that to you're on stage, I could almost feel the team saying, come on, Kirk, you're on. You've got to do the next hustings. You've got to go out there and the cameras will be on, the lights will be on and you're expected to project confidence etc and it's quite hard to turn around in a short period of time you know taking a call just before you go on stage and then going on stage family and friendships are not about all the times you get together a cup of tea and a drink or that that's all good but the real test is are you actually there when you need to be there.

43:38This will be the same for anybody doing a publicly facing role. The intensity of that is hard. I mean, Mark Drakeford, who's the Labour leader in Wales, lost his wife in awful suddenly and unexpectedly. And I can see the struggle of dealing with something private whilst having to be in public. so you chose to go into this this public life as a politician at a relatively late age I said you've you'd had a life a rich life and successful life before it and one of the things that I found fascinating in the books that the Obamas have done was the where they've almost opened the doors into the conversations that took place before Barack Obama chose to go into public life and And he's been very explicit how his wife was quite dead against it because she could see all of these inconveniences, for want of a better term, that came your way.

44:38I'm interested in the conversations that you would have had behind closed doors with Vic, your wife, and who else was involved in that before you made that decision to go and be subject to some of these kind of experiences you've described. yeah i mean there are many conversations along the way i mean vic would have probably preferred i didn't do it because she would know what was involved in doing it and is brilliantly supportive i think she if she was sitting here she would say yeah but i know you i knew you were going to do it anyway and therefore you know we had to talk through how are you going to do it because she would have known that that sort of focus on the outcome focus on the goals would drive me through and almost no holding back in a way but i think if she were asked she would say she'd rather i'd done something else um having finished being director of public prosecutions um and then you know my friends i mean one of my very very good friends and i've got really intense strong friendships that i've had with people for a very very long time which actually helps as well going back to the earlier discussion.

45:48So I've always got a retreat place. If I'm, you know, if I'm being attacked, et cetera, I've got strong lifelong friendships with people who know me because of who I am. Where did they come from, from childhood, from school? School, uni, playing football. And one of the people I've known from school, very, very good friend of mine, when I had the conversation with him about running for the AAA party, he was dead against it. He said, what's it going to do to your family? why do you want that life you know how some people say oh what a great thing here you know fantastic you'd be leading a party you know what a great thing to do which it obviously is he was he was against it he just thought you're going to put yourself through something which isn't worth it for your family and for your life and that that's really lovely because he was just focusing on me and not anything wider than that.

46:45Do you ever have regrets about it? No. And for all, you know, we've concentrated a lot on some of the challenges of the job. It is, you know, it is the privilege of my life to be leader of a Labour Party. To be leading that party is an incredible privilege. And to be leading that party in the hope that we might win an election and change the country for the better is fantastic you know and because we've focused on the challenges the sense that you know it's only hardship of course there's all of that that'll be there and i readily acknowledge by the way that this is there for leaders in other political parties readily acknowledge that i think for women it's more difficult than men in leadership positions but politics in particular so this isn't about me or about the labor party but it is an incredible privilege and opportunity if we win that election and change millions of lives for the better what an incredible thing to be able to do and to restore politics as a force for good which it can be and should be and where does imposter syndrome sit in your life because senior leaders and the high achievers and the artists and entrepreneurs that have sat on this podcast to a man and woman have told us that imposter syndrome exists what's your relationship with it not very strong i mean i don't um associate with the syndrome very much at all i mean i readily accept as i did earlier that um this is not a path of predestiny for me but i don't really i mean i don't have that imposter syndrome in the way that i know i mean many people in politics and in other walks do have it to a level what about doubt then because i think you know making a decision about what to have for dinner is one thing making a decision that could change or save or take lives as you have to when you're at the top of politics like they are huge decisions how are you a decision maker and i'd love to find out how you come to those big decisions when do you press the button firstly for better or for worse i've had to make tough decisions for a while now so it's not just as leader of the labor party one of the examples i'd give of that is when i was a lawyer i got very involved in doing death penalty cases so this would be representing people who were on death row usually in countries that are part of the commonwealth used to be colonies whether it's death by hanging and we worked intensively in some countries in the caribbean and i would go out there with teams to represent some of the individuals on death row sometimes groups of individuals and to sit in a cell with somebody who is literally going to live or die according to whether you win the case brings into very sharp focus difficult decisions so So I know what difficult decisions are, and I know they have to be taken.

49:48You cannot have a situation where you say, well, that's too difficult. I'm going to walk away from it. That isn't leadership. If you can't take the decision, you shouldn't be in that position. And therefore, it's a necessary part of what you're doing. I've seen other people making decisions when I was in Northern Ireland I saw we were with the police service I was the human rights advisor I was in the control room when there was a dangerous situation in Northern Ireland unfolding and there was various footage camera footage of someone who would got a gun and was making their way towards other people and the fears for the worst I saw the senior officer going up and down with the monitors the screens the sound control knowing that he had to make a decision whether to authorize the officers on the ground to use force, to use lethal force if necessary.

50:34The final decision whether to fire would be theirs, but he knew once he'd given that authorization, that was a possible next step. And just to see and respect, he knew he had to make a decision. He knew he wanted to be totally informed, but he knew the consequences of his decision. What did you learn from the way he operated in that moment? I learned that that's how you make decisions, which is absorb, absorb, absorb, take it in, but be clear. You've got to make the decision and be clear what the consequences are. But he didn't have the luxury of shying away. Because if he shied away, that meant the person with the gun, if they then use that gun, might kill someone.

51:14If you're in a leadership position where you've got to make tough decisions, it's learning and appreciating there are tough consequences whichever way you go. So can I ask about the end of days as a leader then? Because I'm conscious you're an Arsenal fan. You're fast forwarding. Yeah, but what I mean is when you spoke about when you left the CPS, that your time was up there and you made a decision to go into politics. As an Arsenal fan, you lived through the reign of Wenger, where he was an incredible leader, but those last few years were soured by people feeling that his time was up and urging him to make a decision.

51:49What have you learned about the time to walk away from a leadership role when you feel that I've done what I can do, it's time to pass over? I think it's exactly that. I've done what I can do and I now need to go. I felt as a lawyer, I'd gone as far as I could as an individual lawyer and I needed to change and get within an organisation. That's when I went to work with the police service in Northern Ireland. That took me on to being director of public prosecution. I mean, my time in Northern Ireland was really, really important to me because I developed a sense of changing things in a different way.

52:20so knowing when you should step back and go is really important when you've gone as far as you can in the job that you're doing there's a slightly smaller version of what you've just put to me which is really important as well which is being able to get away from the job so i mean this is triggered by you mentioning arsenal um i play football every week um and still now i'd still since i'm 10 i played football used to be twice a week even sometimes three times but now only once What's your position? Middle of midfield on the left-hand side, shouting instructions, pretending I'm a box-to-box player.

52:55Those playing alongside me now would say that that is just a theory of the past here. It's not the present anymore. But in that moment on the football pitch, nothing matters other than football. I'm playing now, I'm playing just with mates that I've known for a long time. There's the usual banter. But the politics and the decision and the stress, I mean, it's another way of getting through this difficulty. It all goes to one side as you're just, there's a single pursuit, which is put that ball in the back of the net and win. I'm not one of these people that will say, oh, it's great to take part.

53:27You know, if I'm playing football, I'm on the pitch to win. That's the sole objective. But going to Arsenal is a different version of that because, you know, I go now with my boy and my girl. I come sometimes, I meet really close friends I've known for a long time. and we all meet, chat before the game, walk down to the game, watch the game. All of that is a sort of ritual that's to do, you know, the actual watching the game is fantastic, but it's a small part of what this is all about, which is something that's given me great joy for all of my life. And I absolutely, you know, it's central football to me in terms of that focus and that release.

54:05It allows me space to get away from everything else that is the job. And I think that's really important. It's again why I would now say making time for my family, which sounds like such an odd thing in a way to say, is really important, actually having that space. Now, I don't wish to be trite because you talk about something as significant as your family. But as somebody that described that you're often in absorbing mode, what have you learned from your years of watching Arsenal and elite high performance teams that you actually think, I can translate that into my world? There's a metaphor there that lands quite well.

54:44if i take the current arsenal team which i think is fantastic i'm biased but i do think this is an incredible group of young players what's incredible about them and why is that different what can we learn from that for me it's two things one there isn't a standout star so when abameyang played for arsenal outstanding star everybody tried to let everything go through him now we've got a team where quite often, you know, after the game, we'll all get together again. And the inevitable conversation, well, who was player of the game? Quite often, it's quite hard to say. And that is really good because everybody's playing well in their positions.

55:26And that's really instructive because you're not relying on one or two standout stars. You've got a genuinely strong squad. I also think that with Arteta, you've got an incredible leader who has managed players in different ways to bring out the very so every player in the Arsenal squad is probably playing better than I've ever seen them play before and better than they've played before that's quite an extraordinary thing to bring about if you take the particular example of Xhaka who two or three seasons ago stormed off the pitch I was there I was with my boy and I said he won't play for Arsenal again.

56:05And Arteta brought him around and now you'd have him first on your team sheet pretty well every week. So that incredible leadership, probably going on, you probably wish you hadn't asked me about Arsenal now. No, not at all. So it's a genuine team where everybody's doing better than they would probably do elsewhere or on their own. And incredible leadership from Arteta. And taking people on the journey, like when I now watch Arsenal, the song at the beginning, it feels like the emirates is together doesn't it yeah and taking people on the journey is really really important the whole team needs to come on the journey with you we're going to move on to our quick fire questions in a moment before we finish with i know before we finish with those i think there is one question that we have to ask you and i think the audience would want to be asked and the challenge here is for you as you have done very well actually for the last hour or so not to get political with your answers um we talk about taking people on the journey right you want the nation to go on a journey with you, commit to the Labour Party, vote you into power.

57:05If they do that, what kind of Prime Minister would be leading this country? An inclusive, determined Prime Minister who will look out for everyone in the country. Perfect. What are the three non-negotiable behaviours that you and the people around you would ideally buy into? The first is be there. You've got to be there. This is a guttural thing for me, just describing earlier. This is particularly, obviously, people close to me, but you've got to be there. All the rest of it is naught compared to being there. And that, just to translate into leadership very briefly, I know this is quick fire, but I felt this when I was leading the Crown Prosecution Service.

57:53certainly feel it as leader of the Labour Party. As leader, you get the plaudits. So if the Crown Prosecution Service did a fantastic job, we had some incredible prosecutions of major terrorist cases, and sometimes there were sort of awards, international awards for the way in which we'd done the case, there was one terrible plot to try and bring down a number of aeroplanes at the same time across the Atlantic, which got thwarted and prosecuted. And my job was to receive the award on behalf of the organisation. But that comes with the be there bit, which is when things go wrong, you carry the can.

58:29And you carry the can for the whole organization. And you take responsibility. You don't go casting around for other people. So be there is a personal thing for me with friends and family, which is the test isn't whether you're phoning every day. The test is whether you're there when the chips are down and you really need to be there. But there's a bit of leadership in that. um the second would be uh don't bullshit i can't stand bullshit agreed you know just uh does my head in and there's too much of it um around um and i suppose the third would be um respect you've got to respect everybody in the team i think they'd be my three non-negotiables what's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness strength i suppose is resilience and focus just being able to see what i'm trying to achieve and and go for it there's many reasons why you're going to get knocked off course but you've got to be utterly focused um on it in terms of weakness i think the undersharing is a weakness and I think probably the time taken to really get to trust someone is a weakness, certainly frustration.

59:49There are probably many others, but I'd say they were definitely weaknesses. What is the thing that you feel people get wrong most often or misunderstand most about you? Some people think that the lack of sort of extrovert passion means that there isn't a massive deep passion to get things done and to get things changed um you know people say well i've heard so and so speak eloquently about this issue and they seem so passionate about it and that is often true but what i my response to that is i've heard so many people speak passionately about a problem brilliantly about a problem but i'm passionate about solving it i don't want to keep describing the same problem over and over again i know what the problem is the passion i've got is i need to change i need to solve that and that's a sort of inner determined passion that isn't always carried in the same way as the sort of articulate expression of what the problem is and i think some people feel that because um i'm not you know passionately describing the problem that somehow there isn't the inner passion to fix the fundamentals and they're totally totally wrong about that anybody who works with me knows that um and i think that's what andrena was trying to get at when she was saying what she said about oversharing and undersharing if you could go back to one moment of your life what would it be and why i think we've probably touched on it would probably be to walk back in on my dad if i could take a second moment i one of the things that was a feature of my mum being very ill towards the end of her life when she couldn't speak and couldn't really move was that our children never got to know her.

1:01:33So if somehow I could take them back to see a version of her when she was at her best, I'd love to do that because they never really knew her. This was not her fault or theirs. They were just young and she couldn't speak at that stage. She couldn't feed herself or anything. And so all they knew was somebody who was, you know, very unable to do things. And I would have loved them to have known what she was really like, which was this amazingly courageous, determined, funny, warm mum. What was her name? Jo. Jo. She sounds amazing. If I could, yeah, if I could just take her back, take them back so they could meet my mum at her best or, you know, would be an amazingly uplifting moment and give them something that in a sense they don't really have now.

1:02:22Very nice. Final question, Kier, is really your last message to leave people with, something ringing in their ears, your golden rule, if you like, to living a high-performance life. If you have that feeling in the back of your mind that somehow the thing you want to do or achieve is not for you, knock that thought out of your mind. I say this to schoolchildren a lot because I think one of the biggest inhibitors, one of the biggest things that holds back aspiration is that thing that somehow says to some young people, as it did to me, that that thing that you might want to do isn't really for someone like you.

1:03:06Get that out of your mind. And once that's out of your mind, you can go a long way. Brilliant. Thank you so much for the last hour and a bit. I think if nothing else, we've proven Angela wrong now. You're no longer an undersharer. That was an insight that I certainly have never seen before to you and the way you think and the way you've lived and the experiences you've had. People can't vote for someone that they don't know. So I think this opportunity for people to get to know you is just really valuable for the people of the country. So thank you very much for the time. Thank you both very much.

1:03:40Thank you. Thank you.

1:03:45And that's the end of the show. I really hope that that took you closer to understanding the man who's been put in charge of running the country. A man who is now one of the most powerful people on the planet. And if this show stands for anything, it's about leaning into people, understanding them more, leading with empathy, leaving opinion at the door. Thanks very much for listening. Remember, stay curious, humble and empathetic. And we'll see you again soon for another episode of High Performance.

1:04:18Thank you.

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