Keir Starmer in Aldershot, on June 29. Photographer: Tom Skipp/Bloomberg
By Ailbhe Rea
On the eve of the opening of the polls for the UK general election, Keir Starmer took a moment to reflect on how far he had come since becoming leader of the Labour Party four and a half years ago, when the party was still reeling from one of the worst defeats in its 100-year history.
“The optimists said it would take 10 years to fix this party and get it back,” he told reporters ahead of a final rally in the East Midlands. “The pessimists said you’ll never fix this party, it’ll never be in government again,” adding: “Here we are.”
He has now led the Labour Party to victory and is on track for the largest majority in parliament since Tony Blair’s New Labour victory in 1997.
The UK’s new prime minister has far exceeded expectations of his chances when he took over from far-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. Bland, dull, “not Tony Blair,” as focus groups often call him, this relative newcomer to the world of politics has partly benefited from circumstances.
Boris Johnson’s “partygate” scandal and Liz Truss’s “mini-budget” — which killed the pound — came at the end of years of Conservative austerity that had led to deep cuts to many public services. They all contributed to the result we have now seen in the UK general election. But Starmer has also played his part, showing a quiet ruthlessness in reshaping his party, purging the Corbynites, even ousting Corbyn himself, and putting the party in a position to win and govern again.
“It feels good, I have to say that honestly,” Starmer told Labour supporters in London after the party passed the crucial threshold of 326 seats in the House of Commons. He added that he knew that “with a mandate like this comes a great responsibility.”
He will now have to show whether the same skills that got him to 10 Downing St can help him tackle a dizzying list of challenges. Britons are bruised by the impact of Brexit, the pandemic and historic pressures on living standards. His government faces a more dangerous world and has little money to improve things at home without broad-based tax increases, something he says he is unwilling to do.
Despite being known as “Sir Keir” — he was knighted for his legal career before entering politics — the UK’s new prime minister came from humble beginnings, something he took pains to remind voters during the election campaign. He grew up, as he often says, in a “pebble-strewn” semi-detached house in Oxted, a London commuter town in rural Surrey. He was one of four children born to a toolmaker father and a mother with a debilitating autoimmune disease, which meant she had to give up her job as a nurse when Starmer was still a child.
Starmer’s father was raising four children and caring for his sick wife alone, and money was often tight. “I remember our phone being cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill,” Starmer said during the campaign. “How hard it was to make ends meet.”
The young Starmer got a head start in life by attending Reigate Grammar, a state school, where he achieved the grades to become the first in his family to go to university. He studied law at Leeds, graduated with honours and was accepted into Oxford University to do a BCL, a prestigious one-year law degree. As a young man in London in the late 1980s, he lived in a “party flat” where he sometimes threw up in the bath, entertained friends until the early hours and wrote radical treatises for niche left-wing publications. But by day he rose to become a respected human rights lawyer.
Starmer, who denies being the inspiration for the handsome human rights lawyer Mark Darcy in the book and film Bridget Jones’ Diary, became known for his pro bono work, including defending people in the Caribbean against the death penalty. He gained a modicum of national prominence by defending two activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, a gardener and former postman, who sued McDonald’s for libel over leaflets criticizing the fast-food chain, in what became known as the “McLibel” case. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002, a few months shy of his 40th birthday.
The following year, Starmer took on a role that would rewrite his theory of change: human rights adviser to the Policing Board in Northern Ireland. His job was to ensure that the new police service, formed after the 1998 peace deal, had the confidence of all communities. Before this role, Starmer had seen himself as someone who fought the system from the outside. This was his first experience of going inside an organization to bring about change. He found this new way to be far more effective.
He then took on a key leadership role, becoming Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. In that role he was responsible for delivering criminal justice in the UK, leading a large organisation of thousands of staff and lawyers through a period of severe austerity. He led the organisation as it successfully prosecuted senior media figures for phone hacking and politicians for manipulating their expenses.
No one was surprised when the country’s former top prosecutor entered politics. After his time as DPP ended, Starmer stood for the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St Pancras in the May 2015 general election, expecting to become Attorney General in Ed Miliband’s cabinet. Instead, he went straight to the opposition benches and joined a Labour parliamentary party that was tearing itself apart after a shock defeat.
During the Jeremy Corbyn years, Starmer, a Remainer, rose through the shadow ministerial ranks to become shadow Brexit secretary. While colleagues like Rachel Reeves refused to serve under Corbyn or quit the party altogether over anti-Semitism, Starmer stayed. But by March 2018, Starmer and his allies—frustrated by the anti-Semitism problem and by Corbyn’s foreign policy—knew he would run for party leader when the time came. For nearly two years, they held secret meetings every Monday morning to ensure he was ready for a leadership campaign when the time came.
The moment arrived in 2020. Starmer ran and won a leadership campaign that hinged on 10 promises to Labour members, essentially preserving the radical spirit of the Corbynite agenda with pledges such as renationalisation, rail, post, energy and water. He paid a memorable tribute to “my friend Jeremy Corbyn.”
Since taking over, Starmer has expelled Corbyn from the party, introduced mandatory anti-Semitism training, and rigorously vetted and sometimes expelled candidates loyal to his leadership. Encouraged by his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and other close associates from the party’s right wing, he has imposed strict fiscal discipline, abandoned almost all of his original leadership promises, and wrapped his party in the trade union flag and embraced the language of security, discipline and patriotism.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. He lost the Hartlepool by-election, a safe Labour seat lost to Johnson’s Conservatives, early in his leadership in 2020, prompting him to consider resigning. The experience has seen him sack advisers, appoint new ones and strengthen his resolve to reform his party.
More recently, Starmer suffered a prolonged and public spat within his top team over whether to withdraw his party’s pledge to spend £28 billion ($36 billion) a year on green infrastructure, culminating in a major U-turn. He was criticized and lost votes over an LBC radio interview in October in which he said Israel “has the right” to cut power and water to Gaza, for which he later apologized.
The team of advisers around him have been described as a “boys’ club”, and have been accused of being heavy-handed in their purge of the Corbynite wing of the party and in their broader attitude towards the party’s elected representatives.
While his dissidents rail against how different he is from the man who ran for leadership four and a half years ago, Starmer is proud of that difference. “I changed my party,” he says. “Now I want to change the country.”
First print: 05 Jul 2024 | 10:21 am IST