On the eve of voting in Britain’s general election, Keir Starmer allowed himself a moment to reflect on how far he has come since he became Labour Party leader four-and-a-half years ago. At the time, the party was reeling from the worst defeat in its 100-year history.
“The optimists said it would take 10 years to fix this party and bring it back to power,” he told reporters before a final rally in the East Midlands. “The pessimists said you would never fix this party, it would never be in government again.” He added: “We are right here.”
Now he has led the Labour Party to victory, heading for the biggest majority in parliament since Tony Blair’s New Labour Party’s landslide victory in 1997.
Britain’s would-be prime minister has far outperformed his chances when he took over from hard-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. Dull, boring, “Tony Blairless,” as focus groups often describe him, this relative newcomer to the world of politics has been, to some extent, a beneficiary of circumstances.
Boris Johnson’s “partygate” scandal and Liz Truss’s “mini-budget” – which plunged the pound – came at the end of years of Conservative austerity, which led to huge cuts in many public services. All of this has contributed to the result we have now seen in the British general election. But Starmer has also played his part, demonstrating a quiet ruthlessness in transforming his party, removing Corbynists, even expelling Corbyn himself, and putting it in a position to win and govern again.
“It feels great, to be honest,” Starmer told Labour supporters in London after the party passed the crucial threshold of 326 seats in the House of Commons, adding that he knew “a mandate like this comes with a huge responsibility.”
Now he must show whether the same skills that took him to 10 Downing Street will help him solve a staggering list of challenges. Britons are hurting from the effects of Brexit, the pandemic and historic pressures on living standards. His government faces a more dangerous world and has little money to spend to improve the domestic situation without raising broad-based taxes, something he has said he does not want to do.
Despite being known as “Sir Keir” – he was knighted for his legal career before entering politics – Britain’s new prime minister had humble beginnings, something he has been working hard to remind voters of during the election campaign. As he often explains, he grew up in a “pebble-strewn” semi-detached house in Oxted, a London commuter town in the Surrey countryside. He was one of four children, whose father was a toolmaker and his mother suffered from a debilitating autoimmune disease that meant she had to give up her work as a nurse when Starmer was a child.
Starmer’s father raised his four children and cared for his ailing wife on his own, and money was often tight. “I remember when our phone was cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill,” Starmer recalled during the campaign. “It was so hard to get by.”
The young Starmer got a new high in life by attending Reigate Grammar, a state school, where he got the grades to become the first in his family to go to university. He studied law at Leeds, graduating with honours, and got into Oxford University to do the BCL – a prestigious year-long undergraduate law course. As a young man in London in the late 1980s, he lived in a “party flat” where he sometimes vomited in the bathtub, hosted friends into the wee hours of the morning and wrote radical texts for niche left-wing publications. But by the day he was climbing the ranks to become a respected human rights lawyer.
Starmer, who has denied being the inspiration for the flamboyant human rights lawyer Mark Darcy in the book and film Bridget Jones’s Diary, is known for his pro bono work, including defending individuals against the death penalty in the Caribbean. He gained national fame for defending two activists, Helen Steele and David Morris, a gardener and a former postman, who were sued for defamation by McDonald’s for distributing leaflets criticising the fast food chain, in what became known as the ‘McLibel’ case. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002, a few months before his 40th birthday.
In 2010 Keir Starmer was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions.
The following year, Starmer took on a role that rewrote his theory of change: human rights adviser to the Policing Board in Northern Ireland. His job was to ensure that the new police service formed after the 1998 peace deal earned the trust of all communities. Before this role, Starmer had seen himself as speaking out against the system from the outside. This was his first experience of going inside an organisation to bring about change. He found this new approach was far more effective.
He then took on a more prominent role, becoming Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. This role put him in charge of delivering criminal justice in the U.K., running a huge organization of thousands of staff and lawyers during a time of major budget cuts. He led the organization when it successfully prosecuted senior media figures for phone hacking and politicians for misappropriating their expenses.
No one was surprised when the country’s former top prosecutor entered the world of politics. After his term as DPP ended, Starmer stood for election in the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras in the May 2015 general election, hoping to become attorney general in Ed Miliband’s cabinet. Instead, he went straight to the opposition benches and joined a Labour parliamentary party that was tearing itself apart after a shock defeat.
During Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure, Starmer, a Remainer, rose from the position of shadow minister to become shadow Brexit secretary. While colleagues such as Rachel Reeves refused to serve under Corbyn or resigned from the party altogether because of anti-Semitism, Starmer stayed put. But by March 2018, Starmer and his colleagues – frustrated by the anti-Semitism problem and Corbyn’s foreign policy stances – knew he would stand for party leader when the time came. For almost two years, they held secret meetings every Monday morning to ensure he was ready for a leadership campaign when the time came.
The time came in 2020. Starmer ran and won a leadership campaign centred on 10 promises to Labour members, essentially aimed at retaining the radical spirit of the Corbynite agenda, with promises such as renationalising rail, mail, energy and water. He memorably paid tribute to “my friend Jeremy Corbyn”.
Since taking the leadership, Starmer has expelled Corbyn from the party, introduced compulsory anti-Semitism training, and rigorously vetted, and sometimes imposed, candidates who would be loyal to his leadership. Encouraged by his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and other close allies on the party’s right, he has imposed a strict financial discipline, abandoned almost all of his original leadership pledges, and draped his party in the Union flag and embraced the language of safety, discipline and patriotism.
It hasn’t been all that smooth. Early in his leadership in 2020 he lost the Hartlepool byelection – a safe Labour seat lost to Johnson’s Conservative Party – after which he considered resigning. The experience led him to fire some advisers, hire new ones and strengthen his determination to make radical changes to his party.
More recently, Starmer faced a long-running public disagreement among his top team over whether he should abandon his party’s promise to spend £28 billion ($36 billion) a year on green infrastructure, resulting in a major backlash. He also faced criticism and lost votes for an LBC radio interview in October in which he said Israel had a “right” to withhold electricity and water from Gaza, for which he later apologised.
The team of advisers around him has been described as a “boys’ club”, charged with purging the party’s Corbynite wing and toughening its broader attitude towards the party’s elected representatives.
While his opponents are adamant about how different he is from the man who stood for leader four and a half years ago, Starmer is proud of the difference. “I’ve changed my party. Now I want to change the country,” he says.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)