How ‘tenacious, diligent’ Keir Starmer won over a shell-shocked party

The new leader's aura of competence and message of unity won him the support of all sections of the party

A few days before Keir Starmer was crowned leader of the Labour party, one of his shadow cabinet colleagues, Jon Trickett, made this observation about the way he operates. "He just has this inner drive. I get this impression that he thinks he has been driven by fate."

This quiet sense of destiny and "innate hunger", Trickett said, seemed to affect much that Starmer did, and how he behaved. "One of the things I have noticed about Keir is that you can be walking through the Commons, or wherever it is, with him in a reasonably comradely way and then, suddenly, he would end up two strides ahead. It is just how he is."