London: Keir Starmer is proof that fortunes can turn relatively quickly. More than three years ago, when UK Labor lost the by-election in Hartlepool, a seaside seat it had held since 1974, the new leader suffered a major crisis of confidence and considered resigning.
“I felt like I'd been kicked in the guts,” Starmer told his biographer. It was a moment when he thought, “We're not going to be able to do this.”
Keir Starmer, pictured here in 2019, almost walked away from the Labor leadership three years ago.Credit: Bloomberg
He made calls to his wife and even to his former legal colleagues at Doughty Street Chambers. Former co-worker Ed Fitzgerald recalled telling him they would always welcome him “if he found it too difficult.”
He resisted it. But Starmer had to be persuaded that he could win a general election, not just someone who could win back enough seats from the Tories to give the next leader a real crack at power.
Barring an almighty upset, Starmer will become Britain's prime minister on Friday, his Labor Party ousting the Conservatives in government after 14 years. Not a mean feat.
Since 1900, when Labor was formed, the party has won only eight out of 32 general elections. Only three Labor leaders, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, have won general elections in opposition.
Starmer, who is 61, had been an MP for just over four years when it was his turn to pick up the pieces in early 2020 from Labour's devastating defeat under Jeremy Corbyn.
Keir Starmer speaks on stage at the party's manifesto launch last month.Credit: AP
Embattled in crisis and bitterly divided over anti-Semitism and Brexit, Labor suffered its worst election result since 1935, attracting less than a third of the votes cast and electing just 202 MPs.
Crucially, it lost 61 seats, many in the traditional north of England and the Midlands, but the party also lost a considerable number of seats in Scotland and Wales.
No party in history had overturned the kind of majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019 in one fell swoop. Now, Starmer is about to prove his election critics wrong.
“He has turned the party around in five years instead of four terms, as he needed to finally win in 1997,” says John McTernan, political adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
“I think it's a huge achievement that's a bit underrated. It should have been a must-win election in many ways for a Conservative government. Labor had its worst result since the 1930s in 2019 and the government is give us money to stay home, gave money to pharmaceutical companies to create a cure for COVID. The government should not be in a situation where it could lose this election.”
For a man about to rule the world's sixth-largest economy, many questions remain about what kind of leader Starmer will become, or even what kind of man he is. A diplomat based in London describes him as sober, responsible, careful, considerate and consultative.
Others call him ruthless. But Starmer seems a man unwilling to play the public role that many people want of him: to be a charismatic leader, a nimble debater, the warm father of the nation.
“You can call Keir boring, if you want. But we tried to be 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.
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 rumored to have been the inspiration for Mark Darcy, the love interest played by Colin Firth in 2001. Bridget Jones's Diary. Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget Jones series, has ruled out that the character of Darcy was based on Keir, but says she can see the resemblance.
Starmer, who before politics was a chief prosecutor and head of the Crown Prosecution Service, has been somewhat reluctant to go down the familiar path of sharing his story. His wife Victoria, 61, trained as a barrister and now works for the NHS. Not traditionally low-profile, he has never granted an interview.
That's why an intimate new biography, published in recent weeks, has shed so much light on his rise from working-class roots in Surrey to knocking on the door of Downing Street as Labor leader.
The book, written by his friend, former journalist and Labor aide Tom Baldwin, offers never-before-seen details of the barrister-turned-politician's formative years, including the “very hard life” of his beloved brother Nick, his frustration with Corbyn. , a brief romp with Trotskyism in Oxford and his lifelong obsession with Arsenal football club.
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“He hates to be called boring,” Baldwin tells this stickhead. “He doesn't think he's boring. His friends don't think he's boring. He's great company with his friends. He turns wooden in front of the TV cameras.”
Baldwin says part of this public persona is a desperate desire to protect her private life and her family. He had a “scary father”, a sick mother and a brother with learning difficulties. From Starmer's speeches, the audience knows that his father Rod was a “toolmaker”.
His late father was a brusque and unsettling presence who used up 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 much 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 worn and the windows cracked.”
Baldwin says he had to drag those things out of him.
“He cried a lot. He doesn't want to let politics pollute his private life. If the cameras aren't there, then he lets himself go,” he says.
Starmer's brothers, two sisters and one brother called him “superboy” because he excelled at everything: school, football and the flute.
He loves football and is known to play five-a-side every Sunday in his constituency.
Keir Starmer in 2010, when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions.Credit: AP
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 look more normal, Keir should probably downplay the footballing side of things. things because it's really quite obsessive.”
Baldwin says Starmer honed his public persona over decades in courtrooms, and as much as his aides want him to, he has a hard time letting go of his persona in the courtroom. For him, politics is serious and he hates people doing politics.
“He hates the way Boris Johnson treats politics like a game and gets away with a Latin quote and a joke.”
He says Starmer's real story is not done justice when seen through his knighthood (awarded for his work as a prosecutor, but he hates being called Sir Keir) and an Oxford University degree. Of the 57 prime ministers so far, 30 were educated at Oxford.
“He is the most Labor leader for a generation,” says Baldwin. “He was the first person in his family to go to university. He spent three decades working as a lawyer. It was right at the end that he decided to go into politics because he couldn't make the changes he wanted. To do that, he had to put his hands on the levers of power.”
Keir Starmer with his wife Victoria at last year's Labor Party conference in Liverpool.Credit: AP
Starmer's fortunes really began to turn with the Partygate scandal in early 2022, which forced Johnson out, followed by Liz Truss' disastrous 49 days and a collapse in Tory support that no one could have predicted.
That he has turned a 20-point deficit in those polls into a 21-point lead in his time as leader owes much to Tory self-immolation, but it would be a mistake to dismiss Starmer's contribution to that turnaround.
John Spellar, a former minister for Transport, Defense and Northern Ireland, who is standing down at this election more than 30 years after being first elected as a Labor MP, believes Starmer's efforts to put the party in a position winning continue to be underestimated.
“I thought it would be a two-term strategy for sure,” he says. “After Corbyn's disaster and 2019, I was sure we would be out of power for another decade.”
He says he has worked so hard that it was inevitable that luck would come his way.
“There was a great line from John Howard,” says Spellar, a lifelong Australophile.
“When asked, 'Why when you crashed and burned before do you think you've won this time?', he said: 'Because I'm getting with the times.' And I think every Labor leader who wins government for us, and we haven't had many, they adapt to the times.”
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For those with views on Starmerism, there are two general camps. Supporters say he deftly blends progressive values with real-world pragmatism; critics argue that he is an apolitical shape-shifter who will say whatever is fashionable and necessary to win.
McTernan says Starmer's Labor promises a break with instability. Instead of five Prime Ministers in six years, it offers only one.
“He's a man with a plan for a decade of renewal. At first glance, the stability should be attractive,” he says. “But I also believe that there could not be a worse time to enter the government. The challenge he faces is similar to Attlee's in 1945: the total reconstruction of the country.”
Embarrassed by Labour's record under Corbyn, Starmer has adopted a zero-tolerance policy on anti-Semitism, expelling 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 failings.
“I think after a whole period of chaos, the public and business and indeed the international community will be delighted to have someone who is calmly competent,” says Spellar.
“I think this is, this has a lot of upside.”
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