Who is Sir Keir Starmer? The working-class lawyer who has taken Labour to the brink of power

According to elections guru Sir John Curtice, there is a 99% chance that Labour forms the next government, either in coalition or with an outright majority, with Starmer getting the keys to No10. Starmer is arguably the most working-class Labour leader since Neil Kinnock, and the only one who was knighted for public service before getting into politics. 

To some he’s a flip flopper who cannot make up his mind, while to others he’s changed the Labour Party for the better, getting it to the bring of power. But who is the man who could be the UK’s next Prime Minister?

I spoke to Tom Baldwin, the author of Keir Starmer: The Biography, to find out more about the Labour leader, his upbringing, what he believes in and what he might be like in power.

‘It wasn’t easy for us’ 

Starmer grew up in a pebble-dashed semi in Oxted, Surrey as the second of four children. He was raised by his parents, Josephine, a nurse, and Rodney, a toolmaker. Now Oxted is known for being the home to Chelsea footballers and other millionaires, but this was not the world Starmer grew up in.

“It wasn’t easy for us,” he said in a speech last week. “My dad was a tool-maker. He worked in a factory - my mum was a nurse. 

“But for most of her life she had a debilitating illness, Still’s disease. To be honest, she would hate that word, ‘debilitating’, because mum never gave up, she never complained. But her illness did shape our lives.

“This was the 1970s of course, so there were hard times. I know what out of control inflation feels like, how the rising cost-of-living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: ‘will he bring another bill we can’t afford?’

“We used to choose the phone bill because when it got cut off, it was always the easiest to do without. We didn’t have mobiles back then but you could still just about get on with it.”

At the age of 11, Starmer’s mum Jo was told she would be in a wheelchair by her 20s, and she’d never have children. But she defied the doctors, although for a lot of Starmer’s childhood she was in hospital - something the Labour leader told Baldwin he hated. 

Jo died in 2015, a few days before Starmer became an MP. Following that, his dad Rodney chose not to attend the new Holborn and St Pancras MP’s swearing in ceremony in Parliament. Starmer loved his mum, but had a strained relationship with his dad.

When his father was ill in 2018, he told Baldwin for the biography: “We hadn’t hugged each other for years. Not since I was a kid. I thought about trying to put my arms around him in that hospital room but, no, it wasn’t what we did.”

After his father died, one of his friends came to see Starmer to tell him how Rodney would watch Parliament TV just to catch sight of his son in the House of Commons. “Dad was proud of me and loved me, even if he couldn’t tell me to my face,” Starmer said.

Class and aspiration

Baldwin tells me that there are two threads from Starmer’s childhood which inform his politics now - class and aspiration. He says: “I think he’s the first Labour leader in my lifetime to really talk about class, and it’s complicated.

“It’s partly about the lack of respect his dad felt, which he [Starmer] feels really keenly still,” Baldwin explains. “His dad had this feeling that people looked down on him. And that snobbery is something that is really raw for Starmer now. I think it explains why his dad was so uptight - so he takes that with him.” 

One of the great misnomers about Starmer is that he is posh due his title. He was knighted for his time as leader of the Crown Prosecution Service, and Baldwin says that he thought “it would be insulting” to the thousands of people who worked for him, if he turned it down. “He doesn’t use Sir,” Baldwin says, “if you look at his notepaper it doesn’t say Sir, he doesn’t introduce himself as Sir.”

The author says that drive and aspiration has pushed Starmer on to succeed, but that comes with guilt for the life he left behind. “He was the only one from his family to go to university,” Baldwin says. “He left his brother, who had some pretty bad learning difficulties, and his two sisters behind.

“He was the only one to go on and become middle class if you like. He went on to become a KC, an MP, but he’s still kind of got his siblings in his head. They didn’t go to university, they didn’t get the chance that he did. So when he talks about breaking down the barriers of opportunity, that’s a really big part of his politics now.”

Director of Public Prosecutions

Starmer graduated with a Bachelor of Law from the University of Leeds in 1985 and gained a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford in 1986. After qualifying for the bar, Starmer acted exclusively as a defence lawyer, specialising in human rights issues as a member of Doughty Street Chambers. He also served as a human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board and the Association of Chief Police Officers.

He was named a Queen’s Counsel (QC, now a KC) in 2002. In 2008, he became Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), holding both of these roles until 2013.

Every time Starmer mentions his past career in Prime Minister’s Questions, he’s greeted with a loud jeer from the Tory benches, but he makes a change from the professional politicians who came before him as Labour leader. And Baldwin says his time as DPP in particular drove his mission to create safer streets.

Changing the Labour Party

Starmer became Labour leader after the disastrous 2019 general election, which saw the party record its worst result since 1935 under Jeremy Corbyn. He defeated Corbynite candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey on a fairly left-wing platform, which included nationalising rail, mail, energy and water and abolishing tuition fees.

Starmer has since reneged on all those promises apart from the railways. The Labour leader also previously said he wanted to hold another referendum over Brexit, although now says there’s “no case for rejoining the EU, single market or customs union”.

The Tory Party has attacked Starmer for his U-turns, and even created a pair of Keir Starmer flip flops to emphasise this. However, Baldwin thinks he can easily explain his movement on these issues.

“Ordinary people, everyday people change their mind,” he says. “Some things which were affordable are no longer affordable, we’ve had Ukraine, we’ve had Covid, we’ve had Liz Truss. 

“You have to change your mind on things - I don’t think that’s a problem for him to answer that. I think there’s a bigger problem - because he’s not really political, he’s not really like a politician.”

Despite this, Starmer, as he himself keeps saying, has changed the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn, his predecessor, will be standing against Labour at the next election, for refusing to accept a report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into antisemitism in the party. Starmer was ruthless in stripping the whip from him and blocking him from standing.

Diane Abbott was suspended for more than a year, after writing in the Observer that Jewish people and travellers didn’t suffer racism and comparing this to abuse aimed at redheads. Starmer believes that these actions have put his party on the brink of power.

What does Keir Starmer stand for?

In focus groups, the most common issue that comes up with Starmer is that people don’t know what he stands for. The amount of U-turns he’s committed has certainly cut through to the public.

Baldwin believes that the most personal set of policies Starmer has announced so far are his five missions: get Britain building; switch on Great British Energy; get the NHS back on its feet; take back our streets; break down barriers to opportunity.

He explains: “Stability because his parents had the stability of owning a house, and he wants to bring some of that back. The NHS because his mum was really sick, breaking down barriers of opportunity because he got to go university while his brother and sisters didn’t.”

Starmer’s reluctant to put himself on a political spectrum from left to right. “He gets quite annoyed if you ask him about it,” Baldwin says. “He prefers values to represent him, rather than an ideology.”

But Baldwin admits: “I don’t think they’ve broken through, and I think, still, people don’t feel like they know about him.” However, as an opposition leader, the writer isn’t sure this matters. 

“Prime Minister’s tend to be defined by how they respond to events,” Baldwin says, “rather than what they say in opposition.” 

“Thatcher - we didn’t really know what Thatcherism was until her second term. Tony Blair - he was defined by events in his second term, Iraq and 9/11.” 

“People looking for a precise definition of Starmerism - I think they’re being a bit premature,” he adds.

What would he be like as Prime Minister?

Starmer is “totally focused on winning, because he can’t do anything unless he wins”, Baldwin says. The Labour leader says that in the last nine years he’s “achieved less than in any other part of his life”.

“He thinks if he could actually show that government can deliver and change people’s lives and start fixing some things, that will do more to restore faith in politics and democracy than any grand delinquent speech,” Baldwin says.

The writer says that he will start by doing “practical straight-forward things”. This is embodied by Starmer’s six steps to change. If you listen to any speech by the Labour leader this election, it’s very clear that the focus is going be on these half-dozen policies at first.

Starmer’s critics say they’re very vague and not particularly ambitious: deliver economic stability, cut NHS waiting times, launch a new Border Security Command, set up Great British Energy, crack down on anti-social behaviour and recruit 6,500 new teachers.

Part of this though comes down to Labour’s inheritance, with tepid economic growth, burgeoning debt and crumbling public services. “Starmer is about doing practical things,” Baldwin says.

“Then if that doesn’t work he’ll think I’ll do something more radical to achieve the missions … I think he wants to go to a different kind of politics, a different kind of governing. 

“I think it’s going to be quite inclusive, bringing people like Natalie Elphicke in - he’s not very tribal, he didn’t come into politics to save the Labour Party. He came into politics to try and save people’s lives.”

Baldwin’s concerns with Starmer as a Prime Minister are not about “an ability to take big decisions”, but the “performative skills to bring people together”. “He talks about a decade of national renewal and bringing people together, maybe that lack of political skill will hold him back,” Baldwin says. 

“Maybe the scale of the inheritance will stop him from doing anything. You’ve got the Ukraine War, you’ve got Gaza - it’s a bleak inheritance, maybe that will stop him. I don’t think the thing that will stop him is a lack of determination and drive.

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.