Who is Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister of the UK?

While it is early to predict how he fares, he has already been credited for carrying out one major transformation — turning around the waning electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in the four years he has led it. We take a look at his journey so far.

Humble origins

A barrister by profession, Starmer, 61, has extensively stressed his humble origins — his father worked as a tool maker in a factory and his mother was a nurse.

Both his parents supported the Labour Party, which has long stood for rights of the working class. Starmer was supposedly named after the party’s first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardie. This would fan in him a lifelong association with the party, and he got actively involved in politics by his teenage years.

He became the first university graduate from his family after studying law at Leeds University, following it up with a post-graduate degree from Oxford.

It was also around this time that Starmer was involved for a get-rich-quick scheme, where he and his friend were reportedly caught by French police for illegally selling ice-creams on the French Riviera. However, he was never persecuted for the crime, regarded as a minor misdemeanour.

From defending the law to framing it

In 1987, Starmer joined the Middle Temple, one of the four court associations called Inns of Court, which are eligible to call their members to the English bar as barristers.

From then until 2015, he built a reputation as a formidable human rights lawyer, travelling across the Caribbean to defend convicts against the death penalty, and even taking on high-profile cases such as the ‘McLibel’ case against McDonald’s. It is remembered today as a massive PR disaster for McDonald’s in the UK for its decision to sue two environmentalists for libel.

Starmer was one of the barristers who helped them in their fight. “He was great back then,” said Helen Steel, one of the environmentalists, in an interview. She said that he also helped them for free for a long period, adding, “When we first started, we wouldn’t have been able to get the case off the ground without his help.”

The Guardian, in 2008, regarded him as one of the brightest lawyers of his generation.

In 2002, he was appointed Queen’s Counsel. He also served as human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board between 2003 and 2008, when he became the Director of Public Prosecutions. In his role as Director, he oversaw important cases and instituted several reforms, most notably a change in the manner of conducting sexual abuse investigations following the high-profile Jimmy Savile case. He stepped down in 2013.

In 2015, Starmer made his foray into politics aged 52, when he was elected as the Labour Party candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras, a seat he has held in the three elections since. During this period, he advocated against Brexit, even recommending a second EU referendum while serving as shadow Brexit secretary for then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Rebranding the Labour Party

In 2020, Keir Starmer found himself in a new leadership position, that of the party head.

This was seen as necessary, given Labour’s worst defeat to the Tories since 1935 in the 2019 elections. Jeremy Corbyn, the previous Labour leader, had steered the direction of the party from an ambiguous centre-of-left space to a defined leftist position. He advocated for the nationalisation of key industries and increased public spending while abolishing tuition fees.

In his four years as leader, Starmer has sought to distance himself from his predecessor, steering the party’s agenda and messaging back to a centrist position. Tom Baldwin, author of the book Keir Starmer: The Biography observed that Starmer’s pragmatic “common-law” approach may have served him well — focusing on the pressing issues and then scaling upward.

With the economic crises plaguing the country in the last 14 years, he promised to restore economic growth and jobs, build more houses and infrastructure, and have better relations with Europe.

“I’ve been in opposition now for nine long years,” Starmer told Politico this year. “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.”

Although, there has also been criticism for his strategy. His pro-Israel stance and conservative views on gender have earned the ire of the more left-leaning supporters of the party. The exit of Corbyn and his supporters from Labour earlier this year, as well as their victories in the current election as independent candidates, could present a thorn in the side of Starmer’s incoming government.

The man himself has mostly remained an enigma. Skepticism of Starmer has centered on this inscrutability, with The Economist raising concern about his ability to “turn with the wind.”