A trip north with the U.K.’s most powerful leader in a generation. Keir Starmer, a human rights lawyer from a small town in southern England, is about to be prime minister of the United Kingdom.
His victory on July 4 was overwhelming. Yet Britain barely knows who he is Starmer has been a politician for only nine years, and since being crowned U.K. Labour leader in 2020 has steered his party from its worst election defeat in almost a century to become the dominant force in British politics.
More than that, his success — just as Western allies flirt with populism — places him instantly as one of the most prominent center-ground leaders in the world. That may be a lonely place, come the year’s end.
Few thought such a transformation possible. His enemies call it luck: they say he has benefitted from Tory calamity (which he has), and is victor by default. The truth is more curious, and impressive.
At 61, Starmer has a long backstory. His father was a silent, authoritarian toolmaker. (Starmer reminds us of his father’s trade so often that the political class, and sometimes the voters, mock him for it.) His mother was a nurse, with the debilitating health condition Still’s disease. They named him after Keir Hardie, the first Labour Party leader.
He excelled at school. He played the flute and football one delicate, one savage and became a lawyer. His siblings called him “Superboy.”
He was socialist, segueing to soft left, and when the hard left Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn fell in 2019, Starmer stood for the party leadership on an unashamedly leftist platform, making 10 pledges to appeal to his predecessor’s acolytes. Once in power, he junked them all, except the last to provide effective opposition. Corbynites and antisemites were purged from the party.
Starmer says now that Covid-19, Ukraine, and the state of the public finances forbid him from proceeding with his original platform. The truth is he wanted to win a general election, and there is no socialist path to that in a constitutional monarchy.
“I’ve been in opposition now for nine long years,” Starmer told me in January. “That isn’t changing lives. We had to get the Labour Party and literally turn it inside out. We lost our way up into 2019 as a party, we lost our way, we lost our bearings.” Did he feel that at the time? “Yeah,” he said, and quickly moved on.
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