LONDON (AP) — For someone often derided as boring, Keir Starmer has achieved a sensational election result.
Starmer led Britain's Labour Party to a landslide victory and have become the country's 58th prime minister on Friday. He is the primary centre-left politician to win a British general election since Tony Blair, who won the election 3 times in a row since 1997.
It is the newest reinvention of a person who went from human rights lawyer to hard-nosed prosecutor and from young radical to middle-aged pragmatist.
Like Blair, who reshaped the party as “New Labour” within the Nineteen Nineties, Starmer, 61, led Labour to a landslide victory over Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party in Thursday's election after pulling the party towards the political centre.
He won by promising voters change but additionally calm: he vowed to bring stability back to public life and provides Britain “the sunlight of hope” after 14 years of turmoil under the Conservatives.
“People see Starmer as a very solid man who is obviously very capable in his professional life,” said Douglas Beattie, creator of “How Labour Wins (and Why it Loses).”
“I think people want that caution, they want that stability.”
Starmer, a former Attorney General for England and Wales, has often been caricatured by Conservative opponents as a “left-wing London lawyer”. He was knighted for his role as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and his opponents wish to use his title “Sir Keir Starmer” to portray him as elitist and out of touch with reality. While most prime ministers are knighted, damed – the feminine equivalent – or given other royal honours after their time in office, Starmer is the primary knight of the dominion to change into the country's head of state since Sir Alec Douglas-Hume in 1963.
Starmer prefers to emphasize his humble roots and down-to-earth tastes. He loves football – he still plays football at weekends – and enjoys nothing greater than watching Premier League team Arsenal over a pint at his local pub. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children whom they need to keep out of the general public eye.
During the election campaign, he stubbornly refused to disclose his identity. In an interview with the Guardian, he said he couldn’t remember any of his dreams, had no favorite novel and no childhood fears.
When he then got personal, telling a journalist that he hoped to unencumber Friday night to spend together with his family – his wife is Jewish and Friday Shabbat dinner is a family tradition – the Conservatives used this against him, claiming that Starmer was planning to be prime minister only part-time.
Starmer was born in 1963 to a toolmaker and a nurse who named him after Keir Hardie, the primary leader of the Labour Party. One of 4 children, he grew up in a financially disadvantaged household in a small town outside London.
“These have been tough times,” he said in a speech early in his campaign. “I know what it feels like to have runaway inflation, how the rising cost of living can make you fear the mailman coming down the road: 'Is he bringing us another bill we can't afford?'”
Starmer's mother suffered from a chronic illness, Still's syndrome, which caused her great pain. Starmer said his hospital visits and help together with his mother's care helped reinforce his strong support for the state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
He was the primary member of his family to attend college and studied law at Leeds University and Oxford. As a lawyer, he took on civil rights cases, including that of the “McLibel Two,” environmental activists who were sued by McDonald's for distributing leaflets claiming that the restaurant chain sold unhealthy food.
The cases often brought him into conflict with Conservative and Labour governments, so his move to Attorney General in 2008 surprised some colleagues. But during his five years within the job, he earned a popularity as a tricky and hard-working director of public prosecutions, a task that also included prosecuting people accused of terrorism, organised crime and other serious offences.
Starmer entered politics relatively late, when he was over 50, and was elected to Parliament in 2015. He often disagreed with the party's then leader, the staunch socialist Jeremy Corbyn. At one point he even left the party's top team due to differences of opinion, but agreed to act as Labour's Brexit spokesman under Corbyn.
Starmer has been repeatedly questioned about this decision, in addition to his calls for voters to support Corbyn, a polarising figure under whose leadership the party suffered a crushing defeat within the 2019 election.
He said he desired to stay and fight for change within the Labour Party, arguing: “Leaders are temporary, but political parties are permanent.”
After Corbyn led the Labour Party to electoral defeats in 2017 and 2019 – in 2019 it achieved the party's worst result since 1935 – Labour appointed Starmer to guide the reconstruction effort.
His time in office got here at a turbulent time when Britain suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic, left the EU, handled the economic shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and endured the economic turmoil of Liz Truss's turbulent 49-day term as prime minister in 2022.
Voters are bored with the price of living crisis, a wave of public sector strikes and the political turmoil that saw the Conservative Party send out two prime ministers – Boris Johnson and Truss – inside weeks of one another in 2022 before installing Sunak to attempt to get the ship back on the right track.
Starmer imposed discipline on a celebration with a well-deserved popularity for internal division, dropped a few of Corbyn's socialist policies and apologised for the anti-Semitism that an internal investigation found had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.
Starmer promised “a culture change in the Labour Party”. His mantra is now “country before party”.
Starmer has promised voters that a Labour government could ease Britain's chronic housing crisis and repair its ailing public services, particularly the health service – but without raising taxes or increasing national debt.
“While I don't think anyone is particularly enthusiastic about Keir Starmer, I think he has done a good job of positioning himself as the type of competent adult in the room who will be able to bring the government back to where it belongs,” said Lise Butler, a lecturer in modern history at City University of London.
Starmer was a staunch opponent of Britain's decision to go away the European Union, but now he says a Labour government won’t attempt to reverse Brexit – one other disappointment for a lot of within the party.
“Many people on the left will accuse him of letting them down and betraying socialist principles. And many people on the right will accuse him of changing his mind,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.
“But hey, if that's what it takes to win, then I think that says something about Starmer's character. He will do whatever it takes – and has done whatever it takes – to get into government.”
Associated Press author Danica Kirka contributed to this text.
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