Britain.– Keir Starmer is almost certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after an exit poll predicted his Labour Party would win the general election by a wide margin.
The exit poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, indicated late on Thursday that Labour was on track to win a landslide majority of seats in the British House of Commons. This would mean that Starmer would replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took office less than two years ago.
Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer, has led a remarkable turnaround for the Labour Party, which just a few years ago suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. He has pulled the party back toward the political centre, building on the failures of three Conservative prime ministers.
“He’s been ferociously – some would say tediously – boring in his discipline,” Jill Rutter, a researcher at the London-based group UK in a Changing Europe, recently told The New York Times. “He’s not going to set hearts racing, but he seems relatively prime ministerial.”
Starmer grew up in a left-wing, working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He was not very close to his father; his mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating illness that took her to and from hospital. Starmer was the first in his family to go to university, studying first at the University of Leeds and then law at Oxford.
It is named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist who was the first Labour leader. As a young lawyer, he represented protesters accused of defamation by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, and later became Britain’s chief prosecutor and was knighted.
Elected as an MP in 2015, he succeeded leftist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020 and began remaking the party. He abandoned Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise British energy companies and promised not to raise taxes on working families. He also pledged to support Britain’s military, hoping to banish an unpatriotic label that clung to Labour during the Corbyn era.
Mr Starmer also stamped out the anti-Semitism that had tainted the party’s ranks under Mr Corbyn. Although he has not drawn a link between that and his personal life – his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
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