Keir Starmer, leader Labour Party of BritainA YOUNG mother nodded sympathetically as she described in harrowing terms how she had watched closed circuit television footage of the fatal stabbing of her 21-year-old son, whose heart was ripped apart by a single blow.
“Thank you for this,” Mr Starmer told the woman and other relatives of knife attack victims as they stood around a wooden table last week to discuss ways to tackle violent crime. “This is really, really powerful.”
This was not the best campaign event for either party. a candidate Just a week before an election that his opposition party is widely expected to win. But it was entirely in character for Mr Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer who still behaves less like a politician and more like a prosecuting prosecutor.
Serious, intense, pragmatic and lacking in charisma, Mr Starmer finds himself on the cusp of a potential landslide victory, but he does not have the star power that previous British leaders on the doorstep of power have had, whether it was Margaret Thatcher, the free-market champion of the 1980s, or Tony Blair, the embodiment of “Cool Britannia”.
And yet Mr Starmer has achieved a comparable political feat: less than a decade after entering parliament, and less than five years after his party’s worst electoral defeat since the 1930s, he has with ruthless efficiency transformed Labour into an electable party, taking advantage of the failures of three Conservative prime ministers to put it at the centre of key policy.
“Don’t forget what they’ve done,” Mr Starmer said as he took the stage at a rally in London on Saturday wearing a pressed white shirt. “Don’t forget party-gate, don’t forget Covid contracts, don’t forget the lies, don’t forget the bribes.”
In cataloguing this parade of Conservative scandals and crises, he brought the crowd of 350 to their feet. But it was a rare moment that reflected Mr Starmer’s enigma.
Polls predict a landslide victory for his party in parliament on Thursday, but also indicate that British voters do not like him. They struggle to sympathize with a man who seems less at home in the political arena than he is at court, where he excelled.
“He doesn’t embrace the performative side of politics,” said Tom Baldwin, a former Labor Party adviser who has published a biography of Mr. Starmer. While other politicians aspire to high-flown rhetoric, Mr. Starmer talks seriously about practical problem-solving and putting building blocks on top of each other.
“Nobody's going to see it,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It's boring. But at the end of it, you'll find he's built a house.”
Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant who worked as a research fellow at the London research group UK in a Changing Europe, said: “He has been very brutal – some would say boring – in his discipline. He's not going to make heart-beats rise, but he does look relatively prime ministerial.”
Growing up in a working-class family in Surrey, outside London, Mr. Starmer did not have an easy childhood. His relationship with his father, a toolmaker, was distant. His mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating illness that kept her in and out of the hospital. Mr. Starmer became the first college graduate in his family, studying law first at Leeds University and then at Oxford.
His family were left-wing. Mr Starmer was named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist and the first leader of the Labour Party. He later recalled that as a teenager he wished he had been called Dave or Pete.
As a young lawyer, Mr. Starmer represented protesters accused of defamation by the fast-food chain McDonald's, became Britain's chief prosecutor and was awarded a knighthood. Even then, he used his legal mind to persuade judges rather than courtroom dramas to sway juries, an unassuming name that followed him into politics.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who debated him in Parliament, once called him “Captain Crashtrooni snoozefest”.
Mr Starmer may lack the simple words of his rival, but he used his forensic skills on the scandal-hit Mr Johnson, helping to expose the lies he told about Downing Street parties held during the Covid lockdown.
When Conservatives asked whether Mr Starmer had also violated lockdown rules by having a beer and Indian takeout dinner with colleagues in April 2021, he vowed he would step down if police found he was wrong. He was acquitted – an episode that allies said reflected his strict adherence to the rules and stood in contrast to Conservative Party leaders.
But Mr Starmer's political compromises have raised questions about his approach. He worked with left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and took charge of Brexit policy at a time when many of the party's more moderate leaders refused to join his team.
When Mr Corbyn stepped down after losing in 2019, Mr Starmer presented himself as his successor, and won on a platform that incorporated many of Mr Corbyn’s policies to satisfy the party’s then-powerful left wing.
However, after being elected, Mr Starmer took control of the party machinery and made a remarkable turn to the political centre. He abandoned Mr Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise Britain’s energy industry, promised not to raise taxes on working families and committed to supporting Britain’s military, hoping to end the traitorous label that Labour had been hit with during the Corbyn era.
Mr Starmer has also rooted out the anti-Semitism that had contaminated the party's ranks under Mr Corbyn. Although he has drawn no links between it and his private life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
Ms Starmer, who works as an occupational health specialist for the National Health Service, occasionally attends election campaigns. The couple have two teenage children, whose privacy they take great care to protect. In keeping with his wife's heritage, the family sometimes observes Jewish traditions at home.
In banishing Mr Corbyn, Mr Starmer displayed a ruthless side. He also barred Mr Corbyn from contesting his seat as a Labour candidate, although he is campaigning as an independent. Mr Starmer's allies have tightly controlled the list of those allowed to run for parliament, and have excluded other candidates deemed too left-wing.
Mr Starmer’s allies say he is aware of his limitations and works hard to overcome his weaknesses. Although he is not a natural speaker, his speeches have improved since his early days in parliament, when one critic compared his performances to “watching an audience at a literary festival read TS Eliot”.
And yet, the reputation for dullness persists.
“How does Keir Starmer fill a room with energy?” asked the education secretary Gillian Keegan recently, before adding: “He gives it off.”
Criticism irritates. “He doesn't like the boring tag,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Nobody likes to be called boring; he really doesn't like it.”
Mr Starmer's friends describe him as a man with a sense of humour, a healthy home life and true passions beyond politics. Despite knee surgery, he still plays football regularly and competitively (often reserving playing fields and selecting teams). He is an avid fan of Arsenal, a football club not far from his north London home.
In some ways, Mr Starmer has been helped by his relatively recent arrival in parliament. He was not caught up in the infighting of previous Labour governments or tainted by his allegiances to former leaders such as Gordon Brown and Mr Blair, although they and Mr Starmer now have a warm relationship.
There are disadvantages. There are very few Starmer loyalists willing to fight alongside him. There is a similar lack of support among many voters. They may find the Labour Party less objectionable than it was under Mr Corbyn, but that does not mean they are casting their votes enthusiastically.
“Keir Starmer’s aim was to stop giving people reasons to vote against Labor, and he’s been very successful in that,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham in England. “He’s been less successful in giving people reasons to vote for Labor.”
That same sense of incompleteness hangs over even those who admire Mr Starmer. Despite the many hours Mr Baldwin spent with him researching his biography, he said there was “something that was a bit unapproachable” about the Labour leader. “He is a very firm man who doesn’t trust easily,” Mr Baldwin said. “He’s not emotionally prone to overreaction.”
While Mr Starmer has begun to talk more about his personal story, his frequent references to being “the son of a toolmaker” growing up in a “pebble-dash semi” – his modest semi-detached family home – can sound formal, even robotic.
“He doesn’t understand why he should put himself and his inner workings on public display,” Mr Baldwin said, adding that he sometimes struggled to get more than one-word answers from Mr Starmer to personal questions. Once, he recalled, he asked him to explain in detail his feelings about an incident that had caused him pain.
The answer was short, direct and of little help. “I was very upset,” Mr Starmer said, according to his biographer.
