By the end of this year, if the polls are right, Sir Keir Starmer will be in Downing Street as Labour’s first prime minister after nearly 14 years in the wilderness.
But how much do we know about the man who could be leading the country after the election?
Next week the first authoritative biography of the Labour leader, written with his co-operation, will be published.
Serialised in The Times the book by Tom Baldwin reveals new facts and insights about Starmer’s family, upbringing and life before politics. Here are some of the things that we have learnt.
Starmer described his father as a ‘difficult sod’ at his funeral
Baldwin’s book recounts how Starmer has struggled to come to terms with the relationship he had with his father, Rod, who was distant from his children and often fell out with friends and neighbours when Starmer was growing up.
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He said if his father was at home meals were “usually eaten in silence so that he could read his newspaper”.
• The private life of Keir Starmer — his wife and family reveal all
It was only after he died that he realised how proud his father, a working-class tool maker, had been of him. He found a scrapbook at the back of a cupboard filled with newspaper cuttings about his career. “I didn’t really know what to think about it, why he had taken all that trouble, then hidden it,” Starmer said.
At his funeral Starmer gave a eulogy that began: “Since we’re in a church I had better be truthful. He was a difficult sod.”
Starmer has a younger brother who has learning difficulties
For the first time Starmer talks about his brother Nick, who suffers from learning difficulties due to complications when he was born. He describes how he was labelled “thick” or “stupid” by other children, while Starmer’s sister reveals they both got into fights when they were younger as they defended their brother.
The Labour leader was in the same class at school as Fatboy Slim
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Starmer learnt to play the violin alongside the musician Norman Cook at grammar school. “Thankfully, Keir is a way better politician than he was a violinist,” Cook told the book’s author. For his part, Starmer has hazy memories of going to see the first band formed by Cook and Paul Heaton, a punk forerunner of the Housemartins called the Stomping Pond Frogs, at gigs in local village halls.
Starmer also used to have political rows on the 410 bus to school with Andrew Sullivan, a classmate, who would later become an influential libertarian writer.
Sullivan described Starmer as a “bit of a wild man, without any of that lawyerly restraint you see today”.
“There were a few times when the boys on the 410 got called out in morning assembly because all kind of stuff was going on with us on the top deck,” he said.
Starmer took two trips to communist-controlled eastern Europe as a young man
Starmer and a friend diverted off an Interrail holiday after leaving school and travelled to Hungary and Romania to see what lay beyond the Iron Curtain. He later travelled to Czechoslovakia to help restore a memorial to civilians murdered by the Nazis in the village of Lidice. But Starmer says he did not like what he saw. “We were robbed at one campsite and spied on the whole time we were there,” he said. “I got a glimpse of a totalitarian regime — I wouldn’t want to live like that.”
Barack Obama encouraged Starmer to talk about his childhood
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The former president held a Zoom call with Starmer in 2021 arranged by David Lammy, who had been friends with Obama since they studied at Harvard together. When Starmer started talking about his father, Obama suggested he should be prepared to speak about him in public. “He could see something in what Keir was telling him that could become the architecture for a genuine campaign; one where too often working-class people have struggled to find their voice,” Lammy told Baldwin.
Starmer had three serious girlfriends before meeting his wife, Vic, whom he married when he was 45
Starmer’s first serious girlfriend was Angela O’Brien, a psychology student who he met at Leeds university and one of seven children from an Irish Catholic family in Manchester. Baldwin says the two were together, on and off, for the next decade.
He was later in a relationship with a fellow Doughty Street barrister, Phillippa Kaufmann, with whom he bought his first house in Hackney. After that broke up he had a relationship with Julie Morris, an employment lawyer and former gymnast, who friends remember performing handstands at parties.
Ed Miliband persuaded Starmer to become an MP
When Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Ed Miliband, then Labour leader, was instrumental in persuading him to enter politics. The pair first met in 2008 when Miliband was a government minister and stayed in touch — living just half a mile from one another and becoming friends. Starmer could not be a Labour member as head of the CPS party officials but Miliband managed to delay the selection process for the Holborn & St Pancras seat to allow Starmer to stand. Despite claims of splits Miliband is still one of Starmer’s closest friends in politics.
Starmer began preparing to be Labour leader five years before he got the job
From early on in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership Starmer secretly began preparing to replace him.
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“Right from the start, he was continually thinking how he would have done something differently if he was leader,” Chris Ward, an early key aide told Baldwin.
“We’d book afternoons out to practise. There would be a budget and I’d say to him, one day you might have to respond to this, so we’d sit down, go through the Treasury’s figures together, and work out what he would have done if he had been leader.”
During the 2017 election his aides drew up a spreadsheet of Labour MPs who might support him if Corbyn was forced to resign while during the 2019 election his campaign team met twice a week to plot their leadership challenge.
Starmer nearly resigned as Labour leader in 2021
In the aftermath of losing the Hartlepool by-election and poor results in the local elections Starmer came close to resigning. He was talked out of it by his wife who urged him not to act in haste while other friends were also brought in by aides to encourage him to stand firm. Starmer told Baldwin that his wobble was in part due to the fact that he had not taken the job out of burning personal ambition.
“I’m not fulfilling some lifelong dream here. I could happily work in the bookshop or something,” he said.
Starmer hates being described as boring
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“I might not be able to deliver a speech like Neil Kinnock or tell a joke like a stand-up comedian, but I don’t think it’s how I’m seen by the people who know me best,” he told the author.
If Starmer enters Downing Street he will become Labour’s ‘most working-class prime minister’ in half a century
Baldwin’s book chronicles Starmer’s rise to the top of politics from a house with “holes in the wall” whose parents could not afford to get redecorated even when the downstairs was entirely flooded. His father was a tool maker but left his job to look after his mother who suffered from a serious immune disease that she nearly died from when Starmer was 13.
The shadow cabinet minister Nick Thomas-Symonds, who has written biographies of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, said Starmer was “far more working class than either of them”. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown also had middle-class backgrounds although James Callaghan left school at 16 and went to work as a clerk because his family could not support his continued education.
Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin (William Collins, £25) is published on February 29. To order a copy for £22.50 go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
