Keir Starmer, the steely incoming Labour prime minister

First light was breaking over the Thames as Britain’s new prime minister walked into the cavernous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern at 5am on Friday. Sir Keir Starmer looked out at the sea of relief on the faces of Labour activists and declared: “We can look forward again, walk into the morning.”

It was a stunning moment of vindication for the “lefty lawyer”, as outgoing premier Rishi Sunak called him, who rose from a working-class background to deliver Labour’s first election victory for almost 20 years, pulling the centre-left party back from the electoral abyss.

The world will now be watching to see whether this technocratic politician, sometimes criticised as monochrome, can succeed in an era in which populist politicians, painting with broad strokes in brash colours, are on the rise.

Labour leaders do not usually win. In the party’s nearly 125-year history, there have only ever been six previous Labour prime ministers; Sir Tony Blair was the last to win a popular mandate in 2005. Lord Peter Mandelson, a former Labour minister, memorably summed up the party’s recent electoral record: “Lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose.”

Starmer’s ascent to Downing Street is even more remarkable given that in 2019, under the hard left leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour had slumped to its worst defeat since 1935. The party was expected to be out of power for at least another decade.

Starmer, 61, was elected Labour leader by the membership in 2020 in the dark days after that defeat, inheriting a party riven by factionalism and mired in antisemitism. By May 2021, things had got even worse and Starmer wondered if the task was too big for him. Tory prime minister Boris Johnson travelled to the working-class town of Hartlepool in the north east of England to celebrate a crushing by-election win over Labour. A giant 30ft “inflatable Boris” swaggered above the harbour; in London, Starmer was in despair.

“There was a moment of self-doubt,” says Baroness Jenny Chapman, a close friend. “He’s a human being. That was an appropriate reaction but it made him even more steely and determined that we could not go on like this. Keir reflects. He wants to improve.”

Starmer told the Financial Times the Hartlepool result was a “punch in the stomach”, but his response was to take his party relentlessly towards the centre ground, setting off on a mission that some Labour leaders resist: meeting the voters where they are, not where they would like them to be.

“I saw a leader who really wanted to win,” says Pat McFadden, the MP and former aide to Blair who has co-ordinated Labour’s election campaign. “There’s not an iron law in politics that says you are in the Labour party because you like losing to the Tories.”

Starmer, who won the Labour leadership on a leftwing manifesto offering tax rises and the nationalisation of key industries, now struck different themes. Attempting to win back core working class, social conservatives who had deserted the party during the Brexit years — and middle Britain’s moderate voters — he pulled the party back to a left of centre position.

Corbynites were purged, antisemitism was ruthlessly stamped out, the party machine was retooled. Asked for a comment for this article, one leading leftwing Labour MP timorously declined: “Starmer’s office remain trigger happy and would love my head on a platter.”

Despite his managerial, lawyerly demeanour, Starmer was proving a match for his internal opponents. That came as little surprise to those who have played football against him. Even in his early sixties, Starmer is a hard-tackling box-to-box midfielder, who regularly enjoys eight-a-side games with mates.

Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour party, recalls what he thought would be a friendly kickabout in a football cage in Glasgow. “I saw first hand how ruthless he is about winning,” he says. “I experienced ‘Keir time’ — the match was extended long enough for his team to edge the win.”

During the long months running up to the snap election, Starmer rarely appeared in interviews without the union jack in the background, he adopted tougher language on migration and crime and, crucially — with the appointment in May 2021 of the former Bank of England economist Rachel Reeves as his shadow chancellor — he put fiscal discipline and a pro-business agenda at the heart of Labour’s pitch.

McFadden said Starmer, whose previous costly promises to scrap university tuition fees or to bring private companies back under state control were ditched, “fully bought in” to the need for an iron grip on tax and spend policies. “The alternative is that the Tories add up a massive bill for all the things you’ve promised, scares the electorate, then Labour loses,” he says.

Starmer’s transformation of Labour from a leftwing protest party to a centrist government-in-waiting prompted claims that either he does not believe in anything, or that he is a closet leftwinger waiting to unleash a concealed socialist agenda on Britain.

But nobody doubts his credentials as a natural Labour advocate. As he never ceases to remind voters, his father was a toolmaker and his mother, who suffered from the rare and debilitating Still’s disease, was a nurse: they named their son after Keir Hardie, a founder of the Labour party. He grew up in Surrey, London’s rural hinterland, in a house where money was tight and the phone was cut off when times were hard.

There he attended a local academically selective state school and then went on to Leeds university where he studied law. He was active in student politics — the columnist and Tory peer Lord Danny Finkelstein, a longtime acquaintance, notes that Starmer supported the usual leftwing causes in his youth, rattling tins to support striking miners and boycotting The Times during proprietor Rupert Murdoch’s dispute with the print unions.

But unlike many members of his incoming cabinet, Starmer is not a career politician. Instead he became a successful human rights lawyer and ended up in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service. He did not enter parliament until his fifties. In the years between student activism and becoming an MP, he had changed.

In particular, his time running a big public service made him interested in making bureaucratic machines work. “He’s interested in how, not just what,” says one close ally, arguing that Starmer took a keen interest in turning Labour into an organisation that could deliver change in government.

“He’s very professional,” McFadden says. “He likes things to be done right. He expects people to show up with their homework done. He chairs meetings well. He makes sure people know what has been agreed.”

Starmer is protective of the time he spends with his wife Victoria, who trained as a solicitor and now works in occupational health for the NHS, and his two teenage children. He has said he fears the effect his political ascent could have on his family. Victoria is Jewish and Starmer underwent criticism from Sunak during the campaign for saying he always tries to clock off at 6pm on a Friday night for dinner.

Sunak has also been among those who claim that Starmer stands for nothing, that he “flip flops” from one position to another; that he was a leftwinger while standing for his party’s leadership, where now he is posing as a fiscal ironman. In essence, the country has no idea what it is getting.

The new prime minister is not grounded in economics and is expected to devolve many of those decisions to his most important ally Reeves. Asked what Starmer thought of financial services and the world of business generally, one City grandee said: “I wouldn’t say he ‘gets it’ but he has a benign view. I’ll take that.”

One member of his senior ministerial team says there is no question where Starmer’s instincts lie: “He is absolutely of the soft left of the party. But he brings a professionalism about what is required.”

Meanwhile Jonathan Reynolds, who has been Starmer’s shadow business secretary, says the prime minister has spoken to natural Labour supporters who felt they had lost touch with the party. Rather than having a secret agenda, he had changed tack accordingly: “I don’t believe there is a case for deception,” he says.

During the election campaign, the public outside of his metropolitan north London constituency has seen much more of Starmer but they remain underwhelmed. His performances can be stolid; his nasal tones grate with some voters. Despite Labour’s huge victory, Starmer’s net approval rating is minus 6, according to YouGov.

In private, friends say he is “great company”. Over a pint, he is more likely to discuss football — and his passion for Arsenal — than politics. “His sense of humour hasn’t changed,” says Chapman, who talks about the loyalty that Starmer has inspired over the years.

But ultimately she is not all surprised that he has shown the ruthlessness needed to cross the threshold of Number 10. “He wanted to be leader of the Labour party and he wanted to be prime minister,” she says.

Mandelson believes Starmer — the cautious, sometimes wooden campaigner — will turn out to be a bold prime minister. “I think he will surprise people,” he says.

george.parker@ft.com