LONDON: Labour leader Keir Starmer is a former human rights lawyer turned state prosecutor whose ruthless ambition and formidable work ethic look set to propel him to Britain's highest political office.
The 61-year-old, named after Labour's founding father Keir Hardie, is the most working-class leader of the centre-left opposition party in decades.
“My father was a toolmaker, my mother was a nurse,” Starmer often tells voters, countering his opponents' descriptions of him as the epitome of a smug, liberal London elite.
With his grey pompadour and black-framed glasses, Starmer remains an enigma to many voters who are expected to propel him into Downing Street after Thursday's general election.
His detractors call him an uninspiring opportunist, but his supporters insist he is a business pragmatist who will approach his prime ministership the same way he did his legal career: tirelessly and forensically.
“Politics has to be about service,” Starmer said in a recent campaign speech, repeating his mantra of putting “country first, party second” after 14 years of Conservative rule under five different prime ministers.
The devoted Arsenal fan, who came to politics late in life and is sometimes uncomfortable in the spotlight, has struggled to shed his public image as a retiring and boring person.
But Starmer, whose wife Victoria works as an occupational therapist in the National Health Service, is known for his humour and loyalty in private. The couple have two teenage children, a girl and a boy.
If elected, he has pledged to maintain his habit of not working after 6:00 p.m. on Fridays to spend time with them.
Death of the mother
Born on September 2, 1962, Keir Rodney Starmer was raised in a small stone terraced house on the outskirts of London by a seriously ill mother and an emotionally distant father.
He had three brothers, one of whom had a learning disability. His parents were animal lovers and rescued donkeys.
“Every time one of us left home, we were replaced by a donkey,” Starmer joked.
A talented musician, Starmer took violin lessons at school from Norman Cook, the former Housemartins bassist turned DJ Fatboy Slim, and attended a prestigious London music school at weekends.
After studying law at Leeds and Oxford universities, Starmer turned his attention to left-wing causes, defending trade unions, anti-McDonald's campaigners and prisoners sentenced to death abroad.
He is friends with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney from their time working together at the same law firm and once recounted a boozy lunch he had with her and her husband, Hollywood actor George Clooney.
In 2003, he began to move into the establishment, scandalising colleagues and friends, first with work to ensure that police in Northern Ireland complied with human rights legislation.
Five years later, he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales when Labour's Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.
Between 2008 and 2013, he oversaw the prosecution of MPs for overspending, journalists for phone hacking and youth rioters involved in riots across England.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II but rarely uses the prefix “sir” and in 2015 was elected to Parliament, representing a seat in left-leaning north London.
Just weeks before he was elected, his mother died of a rare joint disease that left her unable to walk for many years.
Rebellion
In 2021, she broke down in tears during a television interview as she described how her agonising death “broke” her father.
Just a year after becoming an MP, Starmer joined a rebellion by Labour lawmakers over radical leftist Jeremy Corbyn's perceived lack of leadership during the EU referendum campaign.
He failed, and later that year rejoined the leadership team as Labour's Brexit spokesman, a post he held until succeeding Corbyn, who led the party to its worst defeat since 1935 at the last general election five years ago.
Since then, Starmer has demonstrated his ruthlessness by returning the party to the centre, purging Corbyn and stamping out anti-Semitism.
The left accuses him of betrayal for abandoning a series of promises he made during his successful campaign for the leadership, including scrapping university tuition fees.
But his strategic repositioning of the Labour Party to put it back on the path to power is indicative of a constant throughout his life: a drive to succeed.
“If you are born without privilege, you don't have time to waste time,” Starmer once said.
“You can't avoid problems without solving them, and don't give in to the instincts of organizations that don't embrace change.”
