London.- Keir Starmer is almost certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after an exit poll projected his Labour Party would win the general election in a landslide on Thursday.
The exit poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, indicated late Thursday that Labour was on track to win an overwhelming majority of seats in the British House of Commons. That would mean 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 moved the party into the political centre while capitalising on the failings of three Conservative prime ministers.
“It’s been ferociously — some would say tediously — boring in its discipline,” Jill Rutter, a researcher at the London-based research group Britain in a Changing Europe, recently told the New York Times.
“It’s not that he makes our hearts race, but he does seem relatively like a prime minister.”
Starmer was raised in a left-wing working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He did not have a close relationship with his father; his mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating illness that forced her in and out of hospital. Starmer became the first university graduate in his family, 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 leader of the Labour Party. 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 to Parliament in 2015, he succeeded leftist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020 and began restructuring the party. He dropped Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise British energy companies and promised not to raise taxes on working families. He also pledged to support the British military, hoping to banish an unpatriotic label that clung to the Labour Party during the Corbyn era.
Starmer also stamped out the anti-Semitism that had tainted the party’s ranks under Corbyn’s leadership. 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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