One month after Tony Blair won the 1997 landslide which ushered him and Cherie into Downing Street, across town in Doughty Street Keir Starmer’s personal life was in turmoil. His long-term girlfriend, Angela O’Brien, with whom he had lived for the best part of a decade, had moved out of the flat they owned together in Islington. There was a strong suspicion that the thirty-five-year-old Starmer might have struck up an overlapping relationship with a younger Doughty Street barrister, Phillippa Kaufmann. They had become close over the preceding years. One friend of the couple says Angela was rather hurt by the situation.
According to Michael Ashcroft’s Red Knight biography, several people claimed that he had “other girlfriends” besides O’Brien and Kaufmann;
“He was quite clever at keeping in contact with former girlfriends, so they didn’t do anything unpredictable.. He’d always return their calls.”
Starmer and Phillippa Kaufmann quickly bought a four-bedroom house in Stoke Newington, north London, in September 1997. By now Angela O’Brien had struck up a relationship with one of Starmer’s colleagues from Doughty Street Chambers, Hugh Barton. By the time Starmer and Phillipa Kaufmann separated, Angela O’Brien and Hugh Barton had married.
Phillipa Kaufmann then took up with another Doughty Street colleague of hers and Starmer’s, Paul Brooks. She soon married Brooks. You might find it difficult enough that one ex-girlfriend had started seeing one of your colleagues, for two exes to be involved with colleagues might be too much to bear. Yet Starmer seems to have coped.
In the 1990s Doughty Street Chambers was the progressive set in London. It quickly expanded and became neighbours in the same terrace at No. 54 with the Spectator at No. 56, where Boris was running a regime which became known as the Sextator. Starmer was giving Boris a run for his money next door…
Speaking at Davos, Zelensky said:
“Europe loves to discuss the future, but avoids taking action today. Action that defines what kind of future we will have. That’s the problem.”