Portrait | Mr Beige is Britain's new PM

WHO IS KEIR STARMER?

Portrait | Mr Beige is Britain's new PM

Behind Keir Starmer's image as a middle-of-the-road fellow who became prime minister only because British voters found the alternatives much worse, there's a man who knows exactly what he wants, believes WILLEM KEMPEN.

HERE are a few of the labels already hanging around the neck of Britain's new Labour prime minister:

Boring.

Bland.

Middle-of-the-road.

50 Shades of Beige.

Lacking conviction.

Stands for nothing.

His election manifesto was “the dullest on record", according to The Telegraph. British journalist Oliver Eagleton wrote in The New York Times that his Labour Party “[ran] a colourless campaign whose main aim was to channel frustration with the government".

But Sir Keir Rodney Starmer also has another, more complicated side. Politico refers to him in a headline as “complex, unknowable, aggrieved". If you take a closer look, warns Eagleton, you will realise he is not simply someone who sets his sails to the political winds.

“His politics are, in fact, relatively coherent and consistent. Their cardinal feature is loyalty to the British state. In practice, this often means coming down hard on those who threaten it. Throughout his legal and political career, Mr Starmer has displayed a deeply authoritarian impulse, acting on behalf of the powerful. He is now set to carry that instinct into government. The implications for Britain — a country in need of renewal, not retrenchment — are dire."

Starmer was first elected to parliament in 2015 at the age of 52, but his political path goes back much further. It was long believed that his parents named him after the Scottish union leader James Keir Hardie, a co-founder and first parliamentary leader of the Labour Party, but Starmer has said he is not sure if that is the case. What is certainly true is that his parents were staunch Labour supporters and Starmer joined the Labour Party Young Socialists at 16.


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He likes to describe his father as a toolmaker but doesn't mention as often that he owned and operated a successful business, the Oxted Tool Company. The family grew up in a wealthy and conservative part of London. Yet his biographer, Tom Baldwin, writes in Keir Starmer: The Biography that Britain's new prime minister comes from a blue-collar family.

His mother, a nurse, struggled with her health all her life after Still's disease, a type of inflammatory arthritis, was diagnosed at the age of 10. Starmer remains an ardent supporter of free public health care in the form of the British National Health Service (NHS), without which his mother might never have had children.

At school he was a standout who was equally adept as a flautist, pianist and violinist as he was on the football field. (He is still a fanatical Arsenal supporter.) After school he qualified as a lawyer at the University of Leeds (LLB) and Oxford (Bachelor of Civil Law), where he was known for his left-wing politics. Even at Oxford, according to Baldwin, he was quite a Trotskyist for a while.

Starmer (front) in his university days in Leeds.
Starmer (front) in his university days in Leeds.

Starmer subsequently became a human rights lawyer and made a name for himself by taking on multinational corporations such as McDonald's and major oil companies in court. He is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the character Mark Darcy (played by Colin Firth), the human rights lawyer who tries to be Mr Right in the 2001 film Bridget Jones's Diary.

By the late 1990s, “Mr Left" Starmer already had a solid reputation as a progressive lawyer who regularly worked without compensation for organisations such as labour unions and environmental groups. But in 1999, Eagleton writes, he surprised many colleagues by agreeing to defend a British soldier who shot dead a Catholic teenager in Belfast. Four years later he was appointed as a human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, where part of his job was to assist police officers when they had to explain in court why they shot at protesters or used water cannons and rubber bullets against them.

In 2008, Starmer moved another step closer to the establishment when he was appointed to head the Crown Prosecution Service, which handles all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales. Some of his decisions in the post are still held against him, particularly on the left of the Labour Party. After the 2011 riots in London, for example, he refused to prosecute the policemen who shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes after wrongly identifying him as a terrorist suspect. Either way, it is thanks to this role that Starmer was knighted in 2014, although he does not like being called “Sir Keir".

In 2019, only four years after winning London's Holborn and St Pancras constituency for Labour while the rest of the party took a beating, Starmer challenged unabashed socialist Jeremy Corbyn for the party leadership. This was after an internal investigation into antisemitism believed to have been tolerated in the party under Corbyn eventually led to his downfall. Starmer suspended Corbyn in October 2020 and banned him from standing as a Labour candidate again in an election. (Starmer's wife Victoria's father was a Polish Jew who emigrated to Britain before World War 2.)

Above: King Charles at Buckingham Palace with Starmer's Tory predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer. Bottom: Starmer arrives at 10 Downing Street with his wife, Victoria.
Above: King Charles at Buckingham Palace with Starmer's Tory predecessor, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer. Bottom: Starmer arrives at 10 Downing Street with his wife, Victoria.

A bunch of nice ironies stem from this: Starmer was challenged in last week's election by former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, who as an independent candidate and Jewish activist for the Palestinian cause took a stand against the Labour Party leader's reluctance to criticise Israel over the war in Gaza. Feinstein came second but reduced Starmer's majority. In a poor third place was Mehreen Malik, a lawyer of Pakistani origin who stood for the Tories.

And not too far away, Corbyn once again won Islington North, the north London constituency he represented as the Labour MP since 1983 — but this time as an independent candidate.

What does all this mean for the kind of prime minister Starmer will be? Is there anything left of the principles he stood for long ago? Will he also “talk left but act right" like Tony Blair, who 19 years ago was the last Labour leader to win a general election?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in Starmer's reaction after he was interrupted by environmental activists during a speech, as shown here:

We gave up on being a party of protests five years ago. We want to be a party of power."

♦ VWB ♦


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