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Keir Starmer was beaten up as teenager trying to defend gay friend, book reveals
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Keir Starmer was beaten up in a nightclub in Cornwall as a teenager after trying to defend one of his friends who was attacked for being gay, a new book reveals.
In an incident that the book’s author, Tom Baldwin, suggests demonstrates Starmer’s values, the Labour leader describes how he was disgusted that his friend had been kicked out of the family home in the 1980s for being gay by his father who told him “you’re no son of mine”.
In the summer after he sat his A-levels in 1980, Starmer and two friends from school, Mark and Graham, worked at a holiday centre for a disability charity in Cornwall, where they went on a night out.
Baldwin recounts how “in cold fury” Starmer “tossed his phone across the table” to show him two photos of his niece’s face, the first looking radiant and happy on her wedding day, the other almost unrecognisably swollen and purple after the attack.
“Starmer’s anger over what happened to his niece, and – despite his best efforts with the police – the failure to prosecute those responsible, is an emotion you rarely see from him in public,” Baldwin writes.
“For my part, I think the argument made casually by a lot of people these days that he stands for nothing is well wide of the mark.”
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