21
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
21 points (78.4% liked)
United Kingdom
4065 readers
502 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.”
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!