Keir Starmer, the leader of The British Labour Partynodded sympathetically as a young mother described, in poignant terms, how she had watched closed-circuit television footage of the fatal stabbing of her 21-year-old son, whose heart had been pierced with a single blow.
“Thank you for this,” Mr Starmer said somberly to the woman and other relatives of knife attack victims as they gathered around a wooden table last week to discuss ways to tackle violent crime. “This is really, really powerful.”
It was not the most pleasant campaign event for a candidate In the week before an election that his opposition party is widely expected to win, Mr Starmer has done just that. The 61-year-old former human rights lawyer is behaving less like a politician than a prosecutor pressing charges.
Serious, intense, pragmatic and uncharismatic, Mr Starmer is on the verge of a landslide victory without the star power that has marked previous British leaders at the brink of power, whether Margaret Thatcher, the free-market champion of the 1980s, or Tony Blair, the avatar of “Cool Britannia”.
And yet Mr Starmer has achieved a political feat arguably comparable: less than a decade after entering parliament, and less than five years after his party suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s, he has transformed Labour with ruthless efficiency into an electable party, pulling it towards the centre on key policies while capitalising on the failures of three Conservative prime ministers.
“Don’t forget what they did,” Mr Starmer told a rally in London on Saturday, striding across the stage in a pressed white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “Don’t forget partygate, don’t forget the Covid deal, don’t forget the lies, don’t forget the bribes.”
As he listed this series of Tory scandals and crises, he brought a crowd of 350 to its feet. But it was a rare moment of fire, which summed up Mr Starmer’s dilemma.
Polls predicting his party will win a landslide majority in parliament on Thursday also suggest he is not loved by British voters. They are struggling to warm to a man who seems less comfortable in the political arena than in the courtroom where he excelled.
“He’s not interested in the performative side of politics,” said Tom Baldwin, a former Labour Party adviser who has published a biography of Mr. Starmer. While other politicians yearn for fiery speeches, Mr. Starmer talks seriously about practical problem-solving and fitting building blocks together.
“Nobody’s going to watch this,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s boring. But at the end, you might find out he built a house.”
Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant and researcher at the London-based research group UK in a Changing Europe, said: “He has been fiercely – some would say boringly – disciplined. He’s not going to set hearts racing, but he looks relatively prime ministerial.”
Raised in a working-class family in Surrey, near London, Mr Starmer did not have an easy childhood. He had a distant relationship with his father, a toolmaker. His mother, a nurse, suffered a debilitating illness that kept her in and out of hospital. Mr Starmer became the first university graduate in his family, studying first at Leeds University and then law at Oxford.
His family was left-wing. Mr Starmer was named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist and first leader of the Labour Party. He later recalled regretting, as a teenager, that he was not called Dave or Pete.
As a young lawyer, Mr Starmer represented protesters accused of libel by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, became the UK’s attorney general and was knighted. Even then, he used his legal wit to persuade judges rather than move juries, a reputation that followed him into politics.
Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, who debated him in parliament, once dubbed him “Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest”.
Mr Starmer may not have his rival’s flippant retorts, but he has used his forensic skills against the scandal-scarred Mr Johnson, helping him expose untruths he told about Downing Street parties held during the Covid lockdowns.
When Conservatives asked whether Mr Starmer had also broken lockdown rules by drinking a beer and eating an Indian takeaway with colleagues in April 2021, he vowed to resign if the police found he had been wrong. He was cleared, an episode that his allies said demonstrated his rigorous adherence to the rules and offered a stark contrast to the Conservative Party leadership.
But Mr Starmer’s policy compromises have raised questions about his approach. He served the left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, taking charge of Brexit policy at a time when many party moderates refused to join his team.
When Mr Corbyn resigned after losing in 2019, Mr Starmer positioned himself as his successor, winning on a platform that included enough of Mr Corbyn’s policies to appease the party’s then-powerful left wing.
Once elected, Mr Starmer took control of the party apparatus and made a remarkable pivot to the political centre. He abandoned Mr Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise Britain’s energy industry, promised not to raise taxes on working-class families and pledged to support the British military, hoping to banish the unpatriotic label that had clung to Labour during the Corbyn era.
Mr Starmer has also stamped out the anti-Semitism that had infected the party ranks under Mr Corbyn. Although he has not linked this to his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
Mrs Starmer, who works as an occupational health specialist for the National Health Service, is occasionally on the campaign trail. The couple have two teenage children whose privacy they fiercely protect. True to his wife’s heritage, the family sometimes observes Jewish traditions at home.
In exiling Corbyn, Mr Starmer has shown a certain ruthlessness. He has even prevented Corbyn from running for his seat as a Labour candidate, although he is campaigning as an independent. Mr Starmer’s aides have tightly controlled the list of candidates allowed to stand in parliamentary elections, eliminating others considered too left-wing.
Mr Starmer’s allies say he is aware of his limitations and is working to address his weaknesses. Although he is not a natural speaker, his speeches have improved since his early days in parliament, when one critic compared his delivery to “watching an audience at a literary festival listen to a reading from TS Eliot”.
And yet the reputation for boredom persists.
“How does Keir Starmer energise a room?” Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, recently asked, before replying: “He leaves it.”
Criticism irritates him. “He doesn’t like being called boring,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Nobody likes being called boring; he really doesn’t like it.”
Mr Starmer’s friends describe him as a man with a sense of humour, a healthy family life and genuine passions outside politics. Despite knee surgery, he still plays football regularly and competitively (often booking the pitch and selecting the team). He is a keen supporter of Arsenal, the football club that plays not far from his north London home.
In some ways, Mr Starmer has been helped by his relatively recent arrival in parliament. He has not been caught up in the infighting of previous Labour governments or tainted by allegiances to former leaders like Gordon Brown and Mr Blair, although he and Mr Starmer now enjoy a flourishing relationship.
But there are downsides too. There are relatively few Starmer supporters willing to fight in a trench with him. The same lack of passion extends to many voters. They may find Labour less contestable than it was under Mr Corbyn, but that does not mean they vote enthusiastically.
“Keir Starmer’s goal was to stop giving people reasons to vote against Labour, and he’s done that very successfully,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham in England. “He’s been less good at giving people reasons to vote for Labour.”
The same sense of incompleteness hangs over those who admire Mr Starmer. Despite the many hours Mr Baldwin spent with him researching his biography, he said there was “something a little bit inaccessible” about the Labour leader. “He’s a very self-absorbed person who doesn’t trust easily,” Mr Baldwin said. “He’s not emotionally diarrhoeic.”
Although Mr Starmer has begun to talk more about his personal history, his frequent references to being “the son of a toolmaker” who grew up in a “pebble-house” – his modest semi-detached family home – can seem superficial, even robotic.
“He doesn’t see why he needs to show himself in public, him and all his inner workings,” said Mr. Baldwin, who said he sometimes struggled to get more than monosyllabic answers from Mr. Starmer on personal questions. He recalled once asking him to elaborate on his feelings about an incident that had distressed him.
The response was terse, direct and of little use. “I was very upset,” Mr Starmer said, according to his biographer.
