Keir Starmer: the methodical lawyer who turned the Labour Party around

The man chosen by the British people to take the reins of the United Kingdom in the coming years is methodical and calculating enough to emphasize his humble origins. The team surrounding Keir Starmer (London, 61 years old), and the journalists who follow his career, joke about the phrases that the candidate has repeated ad nauseum during the campaign. The two most applauded have been: “My father was a toolmaker (toolmakerin the English term)” and “our little stuccoed family terraced house”. These are not memories chosen at random. The first recalls an English working class proud of what they produce with their hands. The second, the standard dwelling of any lower-middle class British family.

When Starmer took over the leadership of the Labour Party in April 2020, he found a party in ruins. His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, had suffered a crushing defeat by the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson, in the 2019 election.

It was up to the newcomer to end a turbulent and confusing era, in which the party had attracted and activated millions of young voters with a hard left turn, but had also alienated millions of middle-class voters. The way Corbyn then digressed and confused on the most important issue facing a generation, Brexit, penalised Labour. Starmer, who had been the party’s spokesman on all things related to leaving the EU – and the main advocate of holding a second referendum – managed to win the party leadership at the worst possible moment.

And although he initially promised not to deviate from the radical path blazed by his predecessor, the new Labour leader was very clear about how to change the party to “stop protesting in the streets and aspire to govern,” in his words. In just four years he had shifted his political proposals towards the centre. A “21st century” version, his supporters argue, of the path to the successful New Labour that Tony Blair undertook.

“After the defeat of 1983 [Margaret Thatcher arrasó en las urnas y dio comienzo a un segundo y exitoso mandato]“We had to go through the leadership of Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, finally, Tony Blair. Fourteen years to reach a position where we could once again take power,” Nick Thomas-Symonds, historian, lawyer, Labour MP and until today the party’s International Trade spokesperson, recalled to EL PAÍS a year ago. “Keir Starmer has managed to do it in three years, something truly remarkable. If after the defeat in 2019 I had been told that Labour would have a 20-point lead in the polls today, I would not have believed it.”

A father and a son

Two circumstances help define the human side of a politician whom many label as a robot, incapable of expressing a minimum dose of charisma. His mother, Josephine Starmer, suffered for most of her life from Still’s disease, a rare and painful type of inflammatory arthritis that kept her hospitalized for long periods. A staunch Labour voter, she died two weeks before her son took his first seat in the House of Commons in 2015. “The steroids and the disease itself meant that for the last two years he could not walk, move his arms or even speak,” Starmer has said on occasion, when he has allowed an interview to open the doors to his private life. “He never exchanged a word with any of my children, and in the end he had to watch one of his legs being amputated,” he recalled.

Married to Victoria Starmer, who works in the National Health Service’s Occupational Health and Safety department, and the father of two children aged 16 and 13, he has lived until now in Kentish Town, north of London. At six o’clock on Friday evenings, barring unavoidable emergencies, he would put aside the Labour leadership and act as a father and husband. These are beneficial reminders of a life before politics, although always linked to a commitment to public service. As a lawyer specialising in human rights, he was involved in all the great litigation of the left against Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution. The rumour that the writer Helen Fielding was inspired by the young Starmer to create the character of Mark Darcy in her novel has never faded. The diaryof Bridget JonesAs head of the Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the attorney general), he spent much of his tenure under a Conservative government and succumbed to the temptation of feeding the tabloid press and self-promotion with headlines that were supposedly tough on criminals.

He has not stopped mentioning, throughout the campaign, this part of his professional past. It was his way of reminding voters that, deep down, he is a man who respects institutions, law and order, seriousness and rigor. But with a tough left-wing soul, preserved through a meritorious academic career – something so typical of the United Kingdom – which led him to grammar school (a public school of excellence for the students with the best grades) in Reigate; later to the University of Leeds (Human Rights) and Oxford (Civil Law), until he became a member of the bar.

The party and the country

Nothing preserves the unity of a political party more than the smell of imminent victory. The left wing of Labour has not forgiven Starmer for the ruthless way in which he got rid of his predecessor, Corbyn, whom he accused of tolerating anti-Semitism within the organisation, and later, slowly and coldly, of all his collaborators. But the new leader has been able to control the reins and avoid internal rebellions at delicate moments, such as when his initial lukewarmness in condemning the Israeli bombings in Gaza provoked a chain of resignations from many members and local representatives of the party. Starmer rectified and set the course right.

“First the country, then the party,” he has repeated incessantly in recent months, every time he has been criticised for some tactical decision disapproved of by the left wing of the party. It was a message for moderate British voters, who have always been suspicious of Labour’s hidden radicalism.

His pragmatism served him well in overcoming the obstacles of turbulent years in opposition. He will have to draw on it to govern, because the general scepticism of the British and the pent-up anger of the conservatives will not give him even the slightest bit of respite.

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