UK Labor leader Keir Starmer nodded sympathetically as a young mother recalled in harrowing terms how she watched CCTV footage of her 21-year-old son being stabbed to death with a stab in his heart wear.
“Thank you,” a somber Starmer told the woman and other relatives of knife attack victims as they gathered around a wooden table last week to discuss ways to combat violent crime. “It’s really, really powerful.”
It’s not the most feel-good campaign for a candidate, a week before an election his opposition is widely expected to win. But it’s entirely in keeping with Mr Starmer’s character.
Mr Starmer, sincere, passionate and pragmatic but not charismatic, finds himself on the cusp of a potentially landslide victory without the star power of previous British leaders who ascended to power, whether it was the free-market 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, the champion, or Tony Blair, the personification of Cool Britannia.
Yet Mr Starmer has achieved what is arguably a considerable 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 led the way with ruthless efficiency. Transform Labor into an electable party, pulling it to the center of key policies while capitalizing on the failures of three Conservative prime ministers.
“Don’t forget what they did,” Starmer told a rally in London on Saturday, pacing the stage in a pressed white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. “Don’t forget the party door, don’t forget the COVID contracts, don’t forget the lies, don’t forget the kickbacks.”
He brought the crowd of 350 to their feet as he reeled off a litany of Tory scandals and crises. But it was a rare fiery moment that captured Mr Starmer’s conundrum.
Opinion polls on Thursday predicted his party would win a lopsided majority in parliament, also signaling his unpopularity with British voters. It would be difficult for them to warm to a man who was not as comfortable in the political arena as he was in the courtroom, where he excelled.
“He’s not in the business of political showmanship,” said Tom Baldwin, a former Labor adviser who published a biography of Mr Starmer. While other politicians are keen on high-profile rhetoric, Mr Starmer talks sincerely about solving real problems and building a foundation for each other.
“No one is going to read this,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s boring. But in the end, you might find that he built a house.
Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant and a Europe researcher at the London-based research group Britain in Change, said: “He was fierce and some would say tedious in his subject. He didn’t get the heart racing, But he does look more like the Prime Minister.
Starmer grew up in a working-class family in Surrey, outside London, and his childhood was not an easy one. He had an estranged relationship with his father, a toolmaker. His mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating disease that kept her in and out of the hospital. Mr Starmer became the first university graduate in his family, studying first at Leeds University and then studying law at Oxford University.
His family is a left-wing family. Mr Starmer is named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist and Labour’s first leader. He later recalled that as a teenager he wished he was called Dave or Pete.
As a young lawyer, Mr Starmer represented protesters accused of defamation by fast-food chain McDonald’s before rising to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and being knighted. Even so, he used his legal acumen to persuade judges rather than sway juries with his courtroom theatrics, a lackluster reputation that followed him into politics.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who debated him in parliament, once labeled him “Captain Casalone”.
Starmer may not be as eloquent as his rivals, but he has lent his forensic skills to the scandal-plagued Johnson, helping to expose the lies he told about Downing Street parties held during the coronavirus lockdown.
In April 2021, when the Tories questioned whether Starmer had also breached lockdown rules by drinking beer and eating an Indian takeaway dinner with colleagues, he vowed to resign if police found him wrong. He was cleared – an incident that allies said showed his strict adherence to the rules and contrasted with the Conservative leader.
But Starmer’s political compromise has raised questions about his approach. He served left-wing former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn and was responsible for Brexit policy when many party moderates refused to join his team.
When Corbyn stepped down following his defeat in 2019, Starmer positioned himself as his successor and won on a platform that contained enough Corbyn policies to appease the party’s then-powerful left.
Once elected, however, Mr Starmer took control of the party apparatus and effected a remarkable shift towards the political centre. He abandoned Corbyn’s proposals to nationalize Britain’s energy industry, pledged not to raise taxes on working families and pledged support for the British military, hoping to remove the anti-patriotic label attached to the Corbyn-era Labor Party.
Starmer has also eradicated anti-Semitism in the party under Corbyn. Although he did not link this to his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
Ms Starmer is an occupational health specialist for the NHS and occasionally appears on the campaign trail. The couple, who have two teenage children, closely guard their privacy. In keeping with the wife’s traditions, the family sometimes observes Jewish traditions at home.
In his exile from Corbyn, Starmer showed a cruel side. He even blocked Corbyn from running for the seat as Labor candidate, despite running as an independent. Starmer’s aides have tightly controlled the list of people allowed to run for MPs, weeding out other candidates deemed too left-wing.
Mr Starmer’s allies say he is aware of his limitations and has worked hard to overcome them. Although he was not a natural orator, his delivery had improved since his early days in Parliament, when one critic compared his performances to “watching an audience at a literary festival listening to TS Eliot recite ”.
Yet the reputation for sluggishness persists.
“How does Keir Starmer liven up a room?” Education Secretary Gillian Keegan recently asked before delivering her bon mot: “He’s gone.”
These criticisms are infuriating. “He didn’t like the boring label,” Mr. Baldwin said. “No one likes to be called boring; he really doesn’t like it.
Friends of Mr Starmer described him as having a great sense of humour, a healthy family life and a genuine passion for things other than politics. Despite undergoing knee surgery, he still plays football regularly and competitively (often reserving playing fields and selecting teams). He is a huge fan of Arsenal Football Club, which plays not far from his home in North London.
In some ways it helps that Mr Starmer has only recently entered Parliament. He was not embroiled in the infighting of the previous Labor government or tainted by allegiance to former leaders such as Gordon Brown and Blair, although he and Starmer now have a flourishing relationship.
There are also disadvantages. There are relatively few Starmer loyalists willing to fight in foxholes with him. Many voters were similarly unenthusiastic. They may find Labor less objectionable than it was under Corbyn, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be excited to vote.
“Keir Starmer’s goal was to stop giving people a reason to vote against Labour, and he was very successful in that,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham in the UK. “He’s not very good at giving people reasons to vote Labour.”
Even those who admire Mr Starmer share the same sense of incompleteness. Although Baldwin spent a lot of time working with him on his biography, he said the Labor leader was “somewhat hard to reach”. “He was a very reserved person who didn’t trust people easily,” Mr. Baldwin said. “He doesn’t have emotional diarrhea.”
While Mr Starmer has begun to talk more about his personal story, he often refers to himself as a “toolmaker’s son” who grew up in his modest semi-detached home in a “pebble-collapsed semi-detached house”. Growing up in a residential home, this can feel perfunctory, even robotic.
“He didn’t understand why he and all his inner workings needed to be put on public display,” said Mr. Baldwin, who said he sometimes struggled to get monosyllabic answers to personal questions from Mr. Starmer. On one occasion, he remembers asking him to elaborate on his feelings about an event that was traumatic for him.
The answer is concise and direct, but not very helpful. According to Starmer’s biographer, “I was very depressed.”
