Keir Starmer, UK Labour Partya young mother nodded sympathetically as she recalled in tragic tones how she watched on CCTV footage of her 21-year-old son being stabbed to death with a single knife through his heart.
“Thank you for your help,” Mr Starmer said solemnly to the woman and relatives of other stabbing victims as they gathered around a wooden table last week to discuss how to combat violent crime. “Your help has been really powerful.”
This isn’t the most pleasant campaign. A candidate Just a week before the election, his opposition party is widely expected to win. But it is entirely in character for Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer who now speaks and acts less like a politician and more like a prosecutor laying down a case.
Genuine, warm and pragmatic but not charismatic, Starmer finds himself on the verge of a landslide victory without the star power of previous British leaders, whether Margaret Thatcher, the champion of free markets in the 1980s or Tony Blair, the embodiment of “Cool Britannia”.
Yet Starmer has pulled off what is arguably quite a political feat: less than a decade after entering Parliament and less than five years after his party suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s, he has with ruthless efficiency reshaped Labour into an electable party and pulled it towards the centre on key policies, while capitalising on the failures of three Conservative prime ministers.
“Don’t forget what they did,” Mr Starmer said at a rally in London on Saturday, pacing the stage in a pressed white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. “Don’t forget Partygate, don’t forget the Covid contracts, don’t forget the lies, don’t forget the kickbacks.”
He ticked off a list of Conservative Party scandals and crises, bringing the 350-strong audience to a standing ovation. But it was a rare moment of passion that epitomised Mr Starmer’s predicament.
Opinion polls show his party will win a landslide majority in Thursday’s parliamentary election, suggesting he is unpopular with British voters, who find it hard to accept a man who is less effective in the political arena than in the courts.
“He doesn’t engage in political theatre,” said Tom Baldwin, a former Labour adviser who has published a biography of Starmer. While other politicians are keen on talking big, Starmer is keen on actually solving problems and building foundations one by one.
“No one is going to watch this,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s boring. But after you watch it, you might realize he built a house.”
Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant who is now a researcher at Changing Europe, a research group in London, said: “He is very good at what he does – some would say very boring. He doesn’t get the pulse racing but he does look prime ministerial.”
Born into a working-class family in Surrey, just outside London, Mr Starmer had a difficult childhood. He had a distant relationship with his father, a toolmaker. His mother, a nurse, suffered from serious illnesses and was frequently in and out of hospital. Mr Starmer was the first in his family to graduate from university, studying first at Leeds University and then at Oxford University, where he read law.
He came from a left-wing family. Mr Starmer was named after Keir Hardie, the Scottish trade unionist and first leader of the Labour Party, and later recalled that as a teenager he had wished to be called Dave or Pete.
Starmer was a young lawyer who defended protesters accused of defamation by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, and later became Britain’s chief prosecutor and was knighted. Even then, he used his legal acumen to persuade judges rather than influence juries through courtroom theatrics, a reputation for blandness that carried over into politics.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once debated him in Parliament and called him “Captain Snoozy”.
Starmer may lack the witticisms of his rival, but he turned his forensic skills to the scandal-ridden Johnson, helping to uncover lies told at a Downing Street party during the coronavirus lockdown.
When Conservatives questioned whether Starmer had also broken lockdown rules by drinking beer and eating an Indian takeaway dinner with colleagues in April 2021, he vowed to resign if police found him at fault. He was acquitted – an incident that allies said showed his strict adherence to the rules, in stark contrast to the Tory leader.
But Starmer’s political compromises have raised questions about his approach. He served under left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and was in charge of shaping Brexit policy at a time when many moderate Labour figures refused to join his team.
When Corbyn was voted out of office in 2019, Starmer positioned himself as his successor and won on a platform that included enough of Corbyn’s policies to appease the then-powerful left wing of the party.
However, Starmer took control of the party machine after his election and made a major shift to the political center. He abandoned Corbyn’s proposal to nationalize the UK energy industry, promised not to raise taxes for working families, and pledged to support the British military, hoping to get rid of the anti-patriotic label of the Corbyn-era Labour Party.
Starmer has also rooted out the anti-Semitism that had tainted the party’s ranks under Corbyn. Although Starmer has not linked anti-Semitism to his personal life, his wife Victoria Starmer comes from a Jewish family in London.
Ms Starmer, an occupational health specialist for the National Health Service who occasionally appears on the campaign trail, and the couple have two teenage children whose privacy they fiercely protect. In keeping with his wife’s traditions, the family sometimes observes Jewish traditions at home.
Starmer showed his ruthlessness in ousting Corbyn, even preventing him from running for a seat in Parliament as a Labour candidate, even though he was running as an independent. Starmer’s aides kept a tight rein on the list of candidates allowed to run for seats in Parliament, eliminating others who were seen as too far to the left.
Starmer’s allies say he knows his limitations and works hard to overcome them. While he is not a natural orator, his speaking ability has improved since his early days in parliament, when one critic likened his performances to “watching an audience at a literary festival listening to TS Eliot read”.
Yet its dull reputation persists.
“How does Keir Starmer energize a room?” Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, asked recently, before delivering her punchline: “He leaves.”
The criticism was irritating. “He didn’t like the boring label,” Mr. Baldwin said. “No one likes to be called boring; he really didn’t.”
Friends of Mr Starmer describe him as a man with a good sense of humour, a healthy family life and a passion for things outside of politics. Despite knee surgery, he still plays football regularly and competitively (often booking pitches and choosing teams). He is a keen fan of Arsenal Football Club, which plays not far from his home in North London.
In some ways, he has been helped by Mr Starmer’s recent entry into Parliament. He has not been embroiled in the infighting of previous Labour governments, nor tainted by loyalty to past leaders such as Gordon Brown and Blair, although his relationship with Mr Starmer is now warming.
But there are downsides. Relatively few of Starmer’s loyalists are willing to fight alongside him. Many voters also lack enthusiasm. They may find Labour less distasteful than it was under Corbyn, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be excited to vote.
“Keir Starmer’s goal was to give people no reason to vote against Labour, and he was very successful in that,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at Britain’s Nottingham University. “But he didn’t do so well in giving people a reason to vote for Labour.”
Even those who admire Starmer feel the same sense of incompleteness. Despite spending a lot of time researching Starmer’s biography, Baldwin said there was “something a little bit inaccessible” about the Labour leader. “He’s a very stubborn person who doesn’t trust people easily,” Baldwin said. “He doesn’t lose control of his emotions.”
While Mr Starmer has begun to talk more about his personal story, his frequent references to being the “son of a toolmaker” who grew up in a “pebble-lined semi-detached house”, his modest semi-detached family home, can sound perfunctory, even wooden.
“He didn’t understand why he and his inner world needed to be made public,” said Baldwin, who sometimes had trouble getting brief answers from Starmer on personal questions. He recalled once asking Starmer to elaborate on his feelings about an incident that had been painful for him.
His response was brief, direct and unhelpful. “‘I’m very depressed,’ ” Mr Starmer said, according to his biographer.
