‘Vic is lovely, but private and she likes it that way.’ That’s what a north London friend has to say of Lady Starmer. But just how long can 49-year-old Victoria hope to dodge the glare of publicity? She is, after all, a First Lady-in-waiting, with her husband, the Labour Party leader Sir Keir, seemingly well set on the path to No 10. Poised, say the polls, for a general election victory when the klaxon sounds.
A woman who didn’t reckon on becoming a political spouse (she and Sir Keir were both working as lawyers when they first met and courted; their first date was at the Lord Stanley pub in Camden) now finds herself having to craft a public persona. And that, say friends, may not come particularly naturally to her. ‘She has,’ notes Nigel Cawthorne, Sir Keir’s unofficial biographer, ‘successfully stayed out of the limelight.’
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Up until a few months ago, Labour was telling people it had no plans for Lady Starmer’s role should Sir Keir become prime minister. The party is now fielding invitations from groups connected to Labour, and discussions have begun about what could be Lady Starmer’s first foray into political and public life.
The signs are there that she’s beginning to quietly embrace a public profile: her recent appearances have won glowing reviews. Fashion-wise, Lady Starmer has been turning to classic, polished silhouettes for her public outings, earning her comparisons with the Princess of Wales, who has the same glossy brunette hair. ‘Vic is very glam,’ a senior party insider tells me. Although away from the glare of politics, she favours a casual look and is snapped primarily in jeans. That said, she did once turn up to a polling station in a Big Bird-meets-fashion-madness yellow faux-fur coat that brought her fans on social media, who declared her a ‘style icon’.
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Such sartorial scrutiny is probably not what she was expecting when, after her first conversation with [Sir Keir, she asked: ‘Who the f*** does he think he is?’ She was then a solicitor, while he was a barrister (and rumoured to be the model for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary) at Doughty Street Chambers. He was running a court case that, in his own words, ‘depended on whether the documents were accurate’. The woman who drew up those documents was Victoria, whom he rang to interrogate about her work. Just before hanging up, she muttered her aforementioned immortal phrase – about which Sir Keir has joked: ‘This tells you a lot about me and a lot about Vic.’
Still, a number of the Labour MPs I talk to say they have never met the party leader’s wife, and it takes jogging most journalists’ memories to remember Lady Starmer’s first name. (She also doesn’t like to use her title, which was bestowed when Sir Keir was knighted for his tenure as the director for public prosecutions, head of the Crown Prosecution Service.) Unlike some previous First Ladies, she has made little or no attempt to court the media, making rare but crowd-pleasing public appearances such as joining Sir Keir on the doorstep of their home to clap for carers, or popping up in the Wimbledon Royal Box on the day that Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister.
Friends, who more commonly know her as Vic or Vicky, are not short of praise. One from within Labour says she is ‘very down to earth, smart and hardworking’, while another adds that ‘she is delightful’. The most frequent word used to describe her is the ever-inoffensive ‘nice’. A north London school mother says: ‘It is very, very, very easy to say lots of nice things about Victoria. There are only nice things to be said, hand on heart.’ Nice is all well and good, but what lies beneath?
Victoria Starmer (née Alexander) was raised in the affluent north London suburb of Gospel Oak with her sister, Judith; she now lives in a £1.75 million townhouse in Kentish Town – part of Sir Keir’s constituency – with her husband and two children, Toby, 14, and a younger daughter whose name has never been confirmed publicly. Victoria went to the fee-paying, all-girls Channing School in Highgate, later qualifying as a solicitor in 2001, then working for Hodge Jones & Allen, before retraining in occupational health in the NHS. Despite the robust ‘Who the f***?’ start to their relationship, Victoria and Sir Keir got married in May 2007 on the Fennes Estate in Essex; Victoria walked into their wedding at the Georgian manor house to the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. A quarter of a century on, all eyes are back on her.
By accounts, she would prefer a low-key life. You’ll find her with her family at The Pineapple pub in Kentish Town. ‘They come in fairly regularly,’ a barman there tells me. ‘Victoria is very nice and community-minded… She is a great presence.’ She’s also intensely family-focused: she has been a governor at her children’s school; her father, Bernard, a former accountant from a Polish-Jewish background, lives on the same road as them; and her mother, Barbara, a Yorkshire-born doctor, time for her,’ says the mayor of Camden, Nasim Ali, who knows the pair well.
Sir Keir later appeared on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories and spoke about his mother-in-law’s death, as the camera panned over to an emotional Victoria, who sat in the audience, wiping away tears. It was her parents who instilled her Jewish faith and the Starmers have continued in that tradition.
Despite Sir Keir being an atheist, the family attend The Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. A politico from the Jewish community tells me: ‘Keir has fully embraced Victoria’s Jewish practice.’ Their children are said to go to Cheder lessons at the synagogue, where young people learn about Judaism.
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They uphold the Shabbat tradition of Friday-night dinners with family and friends as often as they can, even taking to Zoom prayers – read by Victoria’s father – during the pandemic. Invitations to these dinners are known to be ‘highly prized’, with the chance to taste Lady Starmer’s supposedly excellent cooking, but are not used as a political bonbon, instead only going out to actual friends.
Her faith may in fact turn out to be significant in a political sense. As to what her first official foray into politics might be, one Westminster insider suggests that it could be connected with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM): ‘Giving a speech to JLM would be quite an easy introduction because it is already the community she is part of.’ The group has approached Sir Keir’s office about Lady Starmer’s involvement. At the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool last September, she went with Ruth Smeeth, who has since been nominated for a Labour peerage, and a small group from JLM to Liverpool Reform Synagogue to mark the first day of Jewish New Year.
Another Westminster insider says: ‘She has helped shape Keir’s understanding of anti-Semitism,’ which was a charge that dogged Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. They added that discussing the issue with Victoria and her family at the dining table gave the Labour leader ‘a different perspective’.
She could be a winning asset, though for now, the Labour leader and party machinery have been guarding Victoria tightly. That’s not surprising, perhaps, when an eye is cast over the Downing Street experience of Carrie Johnson, or ‘Carrie Antoinette’, as she was dubbed. Towards the end of Boris Johnson’s time at No 10, Carrie had become almost as divisive as her husband. Victoria is likely to be very different in that respect, staying out of party politics. But just as Carrie and Boris had their similarities, so have the Starmers: if Sir Keir is thought of as a safe pair of hands, you will not be getting anything different with Victoria.
Still, there is glamour to their lifestyle, and they shared a languid lunch three or four years ago at George and Amal Clooney’s house near Henley. Amal knows Sir Keir from their Doughty Street Chambers days, and the event ended in the evening with many empty bottles.
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More domestically, the pair have a tight circle of friends in north London, where Victoria hosts dinners. And although she is not a regular parliamentary socialite, she did the rounds of the regional receptions with Sir Keir on the first evening of this year’s Labour Party Conference, with one MP telling me they were impressed that she remembered them: ‘[Lady Starmer] had a friendly smile and made a beeline straight for us, so she clearly knows what is going on in Parliament.’
‘Always present, never there’ – that was Denis Thatcher’s motto as a political spouse. And it seems apt for Lady Starmer’s temperament. That is likely the sole similarity between the Thatchers and the Starmers, but it could prove a template for her role at No 10. As Camden mayor Nasim Ali says: ‘Vicky is her own person and fine with Keir doing his own thing. What is important in a First Lady is being a good person and having that human touch – and Vicky has buckets of it.’
Spotting Lady Starmer in a social setting is a rare thing. Golden glimpses of her hint at a flicker of Jackie O inspiration: at Wimbledon last year, it was the coral-coloured A-line dress she wore with oversized shades in the Royal Box. There may have been a retro-regal influence when she donned a bright yellow faux-fur coat at the Holborn polling station in 2019. Then there was the burgundy belted Valentino-esque shirt dress worn with a gold chain necklace and simple hoops that proved just enough to please the crowds at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool. In general, though, hers is a style that could only be described as school-run chic: wearable separates with a certain ‘I’ve got errands to run’ sensibility. Faux-leather trousers are a recurrent theme, as are crepe blouses and black skinny jeans. Really, the Lady Starmer look is all about being highbrow. Her purposefully pencil-thin eyebrows are her style identifier – and a nod to ’90s glamour à la Gwen Stefani, no doubt, but it’s also the vision of a bygone age of Tony Blair’s New Labour. Time will tell if things can only get better.
This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of Tatler
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