Keir Starmer, Labour to set oust Tories after 14 years

London: Keir Starmer is proof that fortunes can turn relatively quickly. Just a tick over three years ago, when UK Labour lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seaside seat it had held since 1974 – the new leader experienced a major confidence crisis and considered resigning.

“I felt like I had been kicked in the guts,” Starmer told his biographer. It was a moment when he thought, “We are not going to be able to do this.”

He made calls to his wife and even to his former legal colleagues at Doughty Street Chambers. Former workmate Ed Fitzgerald recalled telling him they’d always welcome him back “if he was finding it all too tough”.

He toughed it out. But Starmer had to be persuaded that he could win a general election, not just someone who could win back enough seats from the Conservatives to give the next leader a genuine crack at power.

Barring an almighty upset, Starmer will become British prime minister on Friday, his Labour Party ousting the ruling Conservatives after 14 years. It is no mean feat.

Since 1900 – when Labour was formed – the party has won only eight out of 32 general elections. Only three Labour leaders – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – have won general elections from opposition.

Starmer, who is 61, had been an MP for just over four years when it fell to him to pick up the pieces in early 2020 from Labour’s comprehensively devastating defeat under Jeremy Corbyn.

Mired in crisis and bitterly divided over antisemitism and Brexit, Labour suffered its worst election result since 1935, attracting less than one-third of the votes cast and electing only 202 MPs.

Crucially, it lost 61 seats, many in traditional heartlands in northern England and in the Midlands, but the party also lost a sizeable number of seats in Scotland and Wales.

No party in history had overturned the sort of majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019 in one single leap. Now, Starmer is on the cusp of proving his electoral critics wrong.

“He’s turned the party around in five years rather than four terms, as it took to finally win in 1997,” says John McTernan, a political adviser to former UK prime minister Tony Blair and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.

“I think that’s a huge achievement that’s kind of underestimated. It should have been an unlosable election in so many ways for a Conservative government. Labour had its worst result since the 1930s in 2019 and the government gave us money to stay at home, gave pharma companies money to create a cure for COVID. The government shouldn’t be in a situation where it could lose this election.”

For a man on the verge of ruling the world’s sixth-largest economy, there remain many questions about what kind of leader Starmer will become or even what kind of man he is. One diplomat based in London describes him as sober, responsible, careful, considered and consultative.

Others call him ruthless. But Starmer seems a man unwilling to perform the public role that many people want from him: to be a charismatic leader, the nimble debater, the warm father of the nation.

“You can say that Keir is dull, if you like. But we tried funny and charismatic and look where it got us,” says McTernan, referring to Johnson as “all style and no substance”.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the most interesting fact about Starmer never turned out to be a fact at all.

In the 1990s, when Starmer had become a star human rights lawyer, working on cases against McDonald’s and Shell and opposing the death penalty, he was rumoured to have been the inspiration for Mark Darcy, the love interest played by Colin Firth in 2001’s Bridget Jones’ Diary. Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget Jones series, has since ruled out Darcy’s character having been based on Keir, but says she can see the resemblance.

Starmer, who before politics was chief prosecutor and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, has been somewhat reluctant to walk the familiar path of sharing his back story. His wife, Victoria, 61, trained as a lawyer and now works for the NHS. Untraditionally low profile, she has never given an interview.

It’s why an intimate new biography, released in the past few weeks, shed so much light on his rise from working-class roots in Surrey to knocking on the door of Downing Street as Labour leader.

The book, written by his friend, former journalist and Labour aide Tom Baldwin, offers never-before-seen details into the lawyer-turned-politician’s formative years – including the “very tough life” of his beloved brother Nick, his frustration with Corbyn, a brief dalliance with Trotskyism at Oxford, and his lifelong obsession with Arsenal football club.

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“He hates being called boring,” Baldwin tells this masthead. “He doesn’t think he’s boring. His friends don’t think he’s boring. He’s great company with his friends. He becomes wooden in front of the TV cameras.”

Baldwin says part of this public persona is a desperate wish to protect his private life and his family. He had a “scary dad”, a mother who was ill and a brother with learning difficulties. From Starmer’s speeches, the public knows his father Rod was a “toolmaker”.

His late father was a gruff, brooding presence who spent what little emotional capital he had on his mother, who suffered from a rare form of inflammatory arthritis that limited her mobility.

“We didn’t have a lot when we were growing up,” Starmer says in the book. “I know what it feels like to be embarrassed to bring your mates home because the carpet is threadbare and the windows cracked.”

Baldwin says he had to drag that stuff out of him.

“He cried quite a lot. He doesn’t want to let politics contaminate his private life. If the cameras aren’t there, then he lets go,” he says.

Starmer’s siblings, two sisters and a brother called him “superboy” because he excelled at everything: school, soccer and the flute.

He loves his soccer and is known for playing five-a-side every Sunday in his constituency.

Friend Mark Adams recently described how genuine his love of the game is: “If most politicians try to invent a love of football to make themselves appear more normal, Keir probably needs to downplay the football side of things because he really is pretty obsessive about it all.”

Baldwin says Starmer refined his public persona over decades in courtrooms and, much as his aides might want him to, he finds his courtroom personality difficult to let go. For him, politics is serious, and he has an abhorrence of people playing politics.

“He hates the way Boris Johnson treats politics as a game and bullshits his way through with some Latin quotation and a joke.”

He says Starmer’s true back story is not done justice when viewed through his knighthood (awarded for his work as a prosecutor, but he hates being called Sir Keir) and a degree from the University of Oxford. Of the 57 prime ministers to date, 30 were educated at Oxford.

“He is the most working-class leader of the Labour Party for a generation,” Baldwin says. “He was the first person in his family to go to university. He spent three decades working as a barrister. It was only right towards the end that he decided to go into politics because he couldn’t make the changes he wanted. To do that, he had to get his hands on the levers of power.”

Starmer’s fortunes really started to turn with the Partygate scandal in early 2022, which forced out Johnson, followed by Liz Truss’ disastrous 49 days and a collapse in support for the Tories that no one could have foreseen.

That he has turned a 20-point deficit in those polls into a 21-point lead in his time as leader owes much to the Tories’ self-immolation, but it would be wrong to dismiss Starmer’s contribution to that turnaround.

John Spellar, a former transport, defence and Northern Ireland minister, who is retiring at this election more than 30 years after being first elected as a Labour MP, thinks Starmer’s efforts to put the party in a winning position continue to be underestimated.

“I thought it would be a two-term strategy for sure,” he says. “After the disaster of Corbyn and 2019, I was certain we’d be out of power for another decade.”

He says he has worked so hard that it was inevitable that luck turned his way.

“There was that great line from John Howard,” Spellar, a lifelong Australophile, says.

“When asked, ‘Why when you crashed and burnt before do you think you won this time?’, he said, ‘Because I suit the times.’ And I think every Labor leader who wins government for us – and we haven’t had many – suits the times.”

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For those who do have views on Starmerism, there are two general camps. Supporters say he deftly mixes progressive values with real-world pragmatism; critics argue he is an apolitical shape-shifter who will say whatever’s fashionable and necessary to win.

McTernan says Starmer’s Labour promises a break from instability. Instead of five prime ministers in six years it offers just one.

“He’s a man with a plan for a decade of renewal. On the face of it, stability should be attractive,” he says. “But I also think there couldn’t be a worse time to come into government. The challenge he faces is akin to Attlee in 1945 – the total reconstruction of the country.”

Shamed by Labour’s record under Corbyn, Starmer has adopted a zero-tolerance policy on antisemitism, kicking out members, including Corbyn himself. But like Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister who has become a close friend, Starmer has managed to keep the focus on the government and its shortcomings.

“I think after a whole period of chaos, the public and business and indeed international community alike will be pleased to have someone who’s calmly competent,” Spellar says.

“I think that’s, that’s got a lot of going for it.”

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