Origin Story Origin Story

The season five finale coincides with the general election, so we’ve decided to get very topical indeed with the story of Labour leader and likely prime minister Keir Starmer. To his admirers, he’s the master strategist who took Labour from doom to Downing Street in a single term. To his foes, he’s a ruthless liar who will stop at nothing to crush the left. To the average voter, he remains a bit of a blank slate. What kind of prime minister will he be?

Ian and Dorian trace Starmer’s youthful journey from working-class Surrey socialist to indie-loving, centrist-bashing law student, explaining the legacy of a difficult childhood. He was the star human rights lawyer, at the heart of 1990s controversies from the McLibel case to policing in Northern Ireland, who became the country’s top prosecutor and then a knight of the realm. At the age of 52, he entered politics and soon found himself on the frontline of the Brexit wars, butting heads with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. We end with his leadership of the party and the price of victory.

Why is Starmer such a closed book in public? How did he go from radical socialist to centrist dad? What went down between him and Corbyn? Was he really an arch-remainer? When did he almost throw in the towel? And what are the core values that might define his premiership? Discover all this and more in the story of our next prime minister.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.
• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Tom Baldwin - Keir Starmer: The Biography (2024)
Oliver Eagleton – The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (2022)
Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)
Tim Shipman – Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (2017)

Articles and podcasts

Emily Ashton, ‘Keir Starmer Is Not Who You Think He Is’, Buzzfeed (2020)
Elliott Chappell, ‘Interview with Keir Starmer’, Labour List (2020)
Desert Island Discs: Sir Keir Starmer (2020)
George Eaton, ‘What Is Starmerism?’, The New Statesman (2024)
Charlotte Edwardes, ‘“You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself”: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet’
The Guardian, ‘In Praise of… Keir Starmer’, The Guardian (2009)
Billy Kenber, ‘Keir Starmer: Radical who attacked Kinnock in Marxist journal’, The Times (2020)
Keir Starmer, ‘Sorry, Mr Blair, but 1441 does not authorise force’, The Guardian (2003)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

This episode tells the tale of the anti-vaxxers. The word has only been around since 2001 but inoculation has inspired opposition for as long as it has existed in the West. Dorian and Ian chart the life of vaccines and their opponents from the fight against smallpox in the eighteenth century to the vaccine scandals of the post-war decades. Find out why someone threw a bomb through Cotton Mather’s window, why Gandhi changed his mind, and why Leicester became the anti-vaccine capital of the world.
The drama accelerates with Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR panic of the 2000s, which swept up everyone for Oprah Winfrey to Private Eye, caused a public health disaster and set the stage for the full-blown mania of the backlash against Covid-19 vaccines. How did a rogue British gastroenterologist launch a global movement? How did vaccine scepticism mutate into a giant conspiracy theory? Is Bill Gates really implanting 5G trackers in our blood? (No.) And what’s the best way to get an anti-vaxxer to think again?
It’s a gripping story of science, journalism, paranoia, superstition and people who should know better.
• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 
• Support Origin Story on Patreon
Reading list
• David Aaronovitch – Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2010)
• Jonathan M. Berman – Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (2020)
• Steve Brotherton – Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2016)
• Brian Deer – The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (2020)
• Peter Furtado - Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History (2021)
• Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (2023)
• Anna Merlan – Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2020)
• Seth Mnookin – The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (2011)
• Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge - Conspiracy: A History of Bxllocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them (2022)
• Frank M. Snowden - Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019)
Podcasts and articles
• You’re Wrong About: The Anti-Vaccine Movement (2021)
• Maintenance Phase: RFK Jr. and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement (2023)
• Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’, The New Yorker (2020)
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime?
In part two, Ian and Dorian tell the story of Lemkin’s invention of genocide and his efforts to make it an international crime. They explain how legal wrangling during the Nuremberg trials led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and why it took so long for anybody to be charged with the crime, let alone brought to justice. Why do so many of the twentieth century’s most horrendous offences not qualify as genocide? Why did international condemnation fail to prevent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia? And why is the case against Israel so contentious?
It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the limits of international law, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.
• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 
• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list
• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013
• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998
• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007
• Norman N. Naimark – Genocide: A World History, 2016
• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002
• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust.
In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime?
In part one, Ian and Dorian chart the prehistory of genocide — the ancient desire of groups to utterly eradicate their enemies. They go from the vengeful massacres of the Old Testament and Greek myth to the destruction of Carthage and the Holy War of the Crusades. Then they enter the age of empire, from the crimes of the Conquistadors to the elimination of the Tasmanians. Modern genocide began with the slaughter of the Herero in East Africa and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for the Nazis.
It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the difference between reckless violence and targeted destruction, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.
• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 
• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies,
2013
• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our
Families, 1998
• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta
to Darfur, 2007
• Norman N. Naimark - Genocide: A World History, 2016
• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002
• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016


Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.
In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.
In part two, Ian and Dorian talk about the single most important liberal book ever written, track the ups and downs of the couple's tumultuous affair, and show how Mill became a woke warrior in his old age, fighting against racism and sexism and destroying his carefully-built Victorian reputation in the process.
• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.
• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 
• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.
• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Ian Dunt – How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)

Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) – The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – On Liberty (1859)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – The Subjection of Women (1869)

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham – Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)

Richard Reeves – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)


Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.
In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.
In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.
• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 
• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.
• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list
Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)
Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)
John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859)
John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869)
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)
Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices