Who is Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s next Prime Minister?

Former Chief Prosecutor, Sir Keir Starmer is on track to become Britain’s next Prime Minister with an unprecedented landslide victory which dwarfs that of former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 1997. Yet he is seen by many as an enigma, somewhat lacking in charisma, without a set agenda.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Starmer’s rise from humble beginnings to the threshold of Number 10 owes much to the  “self-immolation” of the Conservative Party currently led by Rishi Sunak. But some of the credit must go to the man himself who, as Labour leader, turned a 20-point deficit in the polls into a 20-point lead.

Often accused of U-turns, Starmer, 61 has pushed Britain’s Labour party towards center ground, ditching former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s more leftist stance. This has earned him enemies within the left of the party who believe he has betrayed its socialist credentials.

Starmer has abandoned all the 10 pledges he made to the party to become its leader in 2020, including reviewing arms sales, taxing the rich and bringing utilities under public ownership. NBC News quotes Laura Parker, ex-adviser to the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn: “The 10 pledges were a really good, comprehensive pitch, and they represented a lot of what I cared about.”

However, as the goal posts shifted and the pledges were dropped, Parker said she felt “a growing sense of frustration,” according to NBC news. Starmer’s supporters further towards the center of the party saw the shifts as pragmatism.

Sir Keir’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, believes that Starmer’s willingness to abandon pledges and his refusal to be defined by them, means he has been able to move “quite fast and ruthlessly.”

Starmer’s critics view him as “dutiful, managerial and a bit dull,” according to the Associated Press. He is the antithesis of gregarious politicians such as the bumptious Boris Johnson whose own landslide victory in 2019 ended in his forced resignation in 2022.

Baldwin, describes his subject as “peculiarly hard to pin down,”  while The Daily Telegraph quotes Sir Keir describing his politics as follows: “If I see something wrong or spot an injustice, I want to put it right,” which the paper says could have been said by any politician of any stripe at any time.

“A vote for Labour is a vote for stability – economic and political,” Sir Keir was widely quoted saying when current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the general election on May 22. Presenting himself as an antidote to  Conservative volatility, Starmer’s message is that he will bring change, but change that is reassuring rather than scary.

Husband and father of two, Sir Keir’s roots are solid working class. One of four children brought up in the conservative town of Oxted, south of London, Starmer’s father was a toolmaker and reportedly a gruff and sullen man while his mother was a nurse.

“There were hard times,” he said in a speech launching Labour’s electoral campaign, according to Associated Press. “I know what out of control inflation feels like, how the rising cost-of-living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: ‘Will he bring another bill we can’t afford?’”

In another revelation in June, quoted by NBC News, Starmer said, “We didn’t have a lot when we were growing up. I know what it feels like to be embarrassed to bring your mates home because the carpet is threadbare and the windows cracked.”

Of his siblings, Starmer was the only one to go to university. He studied law at Leeds and then went to Oxford. He subsequently became what NBC News describes as “a star human rights lawyer,” working on cases against huge corporations such as Shell and McDonalds, before becoming Chief Prosecutor.

Sir Keir’s two sisters and one brother dubbed him “superboy” because he excelled at everything he turned his hand to, be it schoolwork, soccer or the flute. Starmer is still a massive soccer fan.

These were stories that Starmer, ever the lawerly technocrat, preferred to keep under wraps but was persuaded to tell by his team of advisers in a bid to make him more relatable. There are even rumors that he was the inspiration for Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy in the 2001 ‘Bridget Jones’ movie.

Sir Keir did not enter the political arena until he was 51, though during his postgraduate law degree at Oxford, he wrote for a radical leftwing newspaper called Socialist Alternatives, which earned him grief from both left and right.

According to the founder of Socialist Alternatives, Benji Schoendorff, speaking in a YouTube seminar on Starmer, “The guy is an empty suit. I say it on a political level, because personally I really like the guy.”

Never miss a story! Click here to follow The Daily Digest.