LONDON (news agencies) — Dutiful, managerial, a bit dull — Keir Starmer is no one’s idea of a firebrand politician.
The Labour Party hopes that is just what Britain wants and needs after 14 turbulent years of Conservative rule. Starmer, the center-left party’s 61-year-old leader, is the current favorite to win the country’s July 4 election.
Starmer has spent four years as opposition leader dragging his social democratic party from the left towards the political middle ground. His message to voters is that a Labour government will bring change — of the reassuring rather than scary kind.
“A vote for Labour is a vote for stability — economic and political,” Starmer said after Prime Minister Rishi Sunakcalled the election on May 22.
If opinion polls giving Labour a consistent double-digit lead are borne out on election day, Starmer will become Britain’s first Labour prime minister since 2010.
A lawyer who served as chief prosecutor for England and Wales between 2008 and 2013, Starmer is caricatured by opponents as a “lefty London lawyer.” He was knighted for his role leading the Crown Prosecution Service, and Conservative opponents like to use his title, Sir Keir Starmer, to paint him as elite and out of touch.
Starmer prefers to stress his everyman credentials and humble roots — in implicit contrast to Sunak, who is a former Goldman Sachs banker married to the daughter of a billionaire.
He loves soccer — still plays the sport on weekends — and enjoys nothing more than watching Premier League team Arsenal over a beer in his local pub. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children they strive to keep out of the public eye.
Born in 1963, Starmer is the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who named him after Keir Hardie, the Labour Party’s first leader. One of four children, he was raised in a cash-strapped household in a small town outside London.
“There were hard times,” he said in a speech launching his campaign. “I know what out of control inflation feels like, how the rising cost-of-living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: ‘Will he bring another bill we can’t afford?’
“We used to choose the phone bill because when it got cut off, it was always the easiest to do without.”
Starmer’s mother suffered from a chronic illness, Still’s disease, that left her in pain, and Starmer has said that visiting her in the hospital and helping to care for her helped form his strong support for the state-funded National Health Service.
He was the first member of his family to go to college, studying law at Leeds University and Oxford, and practiced human rights law before being appointed chief prosecutor.
He entered politics in his 50s and was elected to Parliament in 2015. He often disagreed with party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a staunch socialist, at one point quitting the party’s top team over disagreements, but agreed to serve as Labour’s Brexit spokesman under Corbyn.
Starmer has faced repeated questions about that decision, and about urging voters to support Corbyn during the 2019 election.
He said he wanted to stay and fight to change Labour, arguing that “leaders are temporary, but political parties are permanent.”
After Corbyn led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019 — the latter the party’s worst result since 1935 — Labour picked Starmer to lead efforts to rebuild.
His leadership has coincided with a turbulent period that saw Britain go through the COVID-19 pandemic, leave the EU, absorb the economic shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and endure economic turmoil from Liz Truss’s turbulent 49-day term as prime minister in 2022.
Voters are weary from a cost-of-living crisis, a wave of public sector strikes and political turmoil that saw the Conservative Party dispatch two prime ministers within weeks in 2022 — Boris Johnson and Truss — before installing Sunak to try to steady the ship.
Starmer imposed discipline on a party with a well-earned reputation for internal division, ditched some of Corbyn’s more overtly socialist policies and apologized for antisemitism that an internal investigation concluded had been allowed to spread under Corbyn.
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