Keir Starmer is all but certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after exit polls predicted his Labour Party would win a landslide victory in Thursday’s general election.
Exit PollsThe Labour Party is expected to win a commanding majority in Britain’s House of Commons, the forecaster, which has accurately predicted the winners of the past five general elections, said late Thursday, meaning Starmer would replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has been in office for less than two years.
Starmer, 61, a former human rights lawyer, has led a remarkable transformation of the Labour Party just a few years after it suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. Brought the party to the political center While taking advantage of the failures of three Conservative prime ministers.
“His work is extremely dry, some would even say boring,” said Jill Rutter, a researcher at the London-based research group Britain’s Changing Europe. In a recent interview with the New York Times“He doesn’t get hearts racing but he certainly looks prime ministerial.”
Mr Starmer grew up in a left-wing, working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He was not close to his father; 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 the University of Leeds and then at Oxford to read law.
He was named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist and first leader of the Labour Party, who as a young man defended protesters accused of libel by the fast-food chain McDonald’s and later rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was knighted.
In 2015, he was elected to the British Parliament and succeeded left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in 2020, beginning to reshape the Labour Party. He abandoned Corbyn’s proposal to nationalize British energy companies and promised not to raise taxes on working families. He also pledged to support the British military, hoping to get rid of the anti-patriotic label of the Labour Party during the Corbyn era.
Mr Starmer also removed Anti-Semitism has tainted the party’s ranks government under Corbyn. Although he has not linked the matter to his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
