For someone often derided as dull, Keir Starmer has delivered a sensational election result
For someone often derided as dull, Keir Starmer has delivered a sensational election result.
Starmer has led Britain’s Labour Party to a landslide election victory, and on Friday will become prime minister — the first leader from the center-left party to win a U.K. national election since Tony Blair, who won three in a row starting in 1997.
It’s the latest reinvention for a man who went from human rights attorney to hard-nosed prosecutor and from young radical to middle-aged pragmatist.
Like Blair, who refashioned the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s, 61-year-old Starmer led Labour to victory over Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in Thursday’s election after dragging the party towards the political middle ground.
He won by promising voters change, but also calm, vowing to restore stability to public life and give Britain “the sunlight of hope” after 14 years of turmoil under the Conservatives.
“People look at Starmer and they see this guy who is very solid, clearly very able in his professional life,” said Douglas Beattie, author of “How Labour Wins (and Why it Loses).”
“I think people want that caution, they want that stability.”
A former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, Starmer has often been caricatured by Conservative opponents as a “lefty London lawyer.” He was knighted for his role leading the Crown Prosecution Service, and opponents like to use his title, Sir Keir Starmer, to paint him as elite and out of touch.
Starmer prefers to stress his humble roots and everyman tastes. He loves soccer — still plays the sport on weekends — and enjoys nothing more than watching Premier League team Arsenal over a beer in his local pub. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children they strive to keep out of the public eye.
During the campaign he was stubbornly resistant to revealing flashes of personality, telling a Guardian interviewer that he couldn’t remember any of his dreams, did not have a favorite novel and had no childhood fears.
When he did get personal, telling a journalist that he hopes to carve out Friday evenings to spend with his family — his wife is Jewish, and Friday night Shabbat dinners are a family tradition — the Conservatives used it against him, claiming Starmer planned to be a part-time prime minister.
