Keir Starmer, the leader of British Labour PartyNodding sympathetically, a young mother recalled, in heartbreaking words, watching the footage of the stabbing of her 21-year-old son, who had pierced her heart with a single stab.
“Thank you for that,” Mr Starmer said sadly to the woman and other relatives of knife attack victims, as they stood around a wooden table last week discussing ways to combat violent crime. “It was really, really powerful.”
It wasn’t the most comfortable campaign event. Candidates weeks before an election that his opposition party is widely expected to win. But that is entirely in keeping with the character of Mr Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer who still behaves more like a prosecutor making a case than a politician.
Serious, forceful, pragmatic and lacking in charisma, Mr Starmer finds himself on the brink of a landslide victory without the star appeal of previous British leaders who entered power, whether Margaret Thatcher, the free-market champion of the 1980s, or Tony Blair, the embodiment of “Cool Britannia”.
Yet Mr Starmer has achieved a comparable political feat: Less than a decade after entering Parliament, and less than five years after his party suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s, he has ruthlessly remade Labour into an electable party, putting it at the centre of 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, pacing the stage in a crisp white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “Don’t forget the parties, don’t forget the Covid deal, don’t forget the lies, don’t forget the bribes.”
As he listed the Conservative Party’s parade of scandals and crises, he brought the crowd of 350 to its feet. But it was a rare moment of brilliance that captured Mr Starmer’s puzzle.
Polls predicting his party will win a majority in parliament on Thursday also suggest he is unpopular with British voters, who struggle to warm to a man who appears less comfortable in politics than in the courtroom, where he excelled.
“He doesn’t do show politics,” said Tom Baldwin, a former Labour adviser who published a biography of Mr Starmer. While other politicians crave rhetoric, Mr Starmer talks seriously about tackling real problems and putting together building blocks.
“Nobody’s going to watch that,” Mr. Baldwin said. “It’s boring. But by the end of the movie, you can see he’s built a house.”
“He has been incredibly fierce — some would say boring — in his field,” said Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant who is now a research fellow at the London think tank UK in a Changing Europe. “He won’t make people’s hearts race, but he looks quite prime minister-like.”
Growing up in a working-class family in Surrey, a suburb of London, Mr Starmer did not have an easy childhood. His relationship with his father, a toolmaker, was distant. His mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating illness that kept her in and out of hospital. Mr Starmer became the first in his family to graduate from university, first at Leeds University, then at Oxford to study law.
His family were left-wing. Mr Starmer was named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist and first leader of the Labour Party. He later recalled that as a teenager he wished he had been called Dave or Pete.
As a young barrister, Mr Starmer represented protesters accused of defamation by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was knighted. Even then, he used his legal mind to persuade judges rather than his courtroom antics to sway juries, a reputation for blandness that has followed him into politics.
Boris Johnson, the former prime minister who debated him in Parliament, once called him “Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest”.
Mr Starmer may not have had the witty one-liners of his rival, but he used his investigative skills to take on a scandal-hit Mr Johnson, helping expose lies he told about Downing Street parties held during the Covid lockdown.
When Tories questioned whether Mr Starmer had broken lockdown rules by drinking beer and eating an Indian takeaway with colleagues in April 2021, he vowed to resign if police found him guilty. He was cleared — an incident that allies said showed his strict adherence to the rules and drew a sharp contrast with Tory leaders.
But Mr Starmer’s political compromises have raised questions about his approach. He served as the left-wing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, taking charge of Brexit policy at a time when many moderates in the party refused to join his team.
When Mr Corbyn resigned after losing the election 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.
But since his election, Mr Starmer has taken control of the party apparatus and made a remarkable turn towards the political centre. He has abandoned Mr Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise the UK energy industry, promised not to raise taxes on working families and pledged to support the British military, in the hope of erasing the anti-patriotic label that had been attached to Labour during the Corbyn era.
Mr Starmer has also cracked down on the anti-Semitism that has tainted the party’s ranks under Mr Corbyn, although he has not drawn a link between that and his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
Ms Starmer, who works as an occupational health expert for the National Health Service, is an occasional presence on the campaign trail. The couple have two teenage children, whose privacy they fiercely guard. In keeping with her heritage, the family occasionally observe Jewish traditions at home.
In expelling Mr Corbyn, Mr Starmer has shown a ruthless side. He even prevented Mr Corbyn from running for his seat as a Labour candidate, despite campaigning as an independent. Mr Starmer’s aides have kept a tight rein on the list of candidates allowed to run for parliament, eliminating other candidates deemed too left-wing.
Mr Starmer’s allies say he is aware of his limitations and works to overcome them. While he is not a natural orator, his speeches have improved since his early days in parliament, when one critic likened his performances to “watching an audience at a literary festival listen to a reading by TS Eliot”.
However, the reputation for dullness remains.
“How does Keir Starmer energise a room?” Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, asked recently, before joking: “He walks away.”
The criticism was jarring. “He didn’t like the label boring,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Nobody likes being called boring; he really didn’t like it.”
Friends of Mr Starmer describe him as a man with a good sense of humour, a healthy family life and real passions outside politics. Despite knee surgery, he plays football regularly and competitively (often reserving places on the pitch and picking teams). He is a passionate fan of Arsenal, the football club that plays not far from his home in north London.
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 loyalty to former leaders such as Gordon Brown and Mr Blair. Now, however, Mr Blair and Mr Starmer have a developing relationship.
There are downsides, too. There are relatively few Starmer loyalists willing to fight in the trenches with him. There is a similar lack of enthusiasm among many voters. They may see Labour as less unpopular than under Mr Corbyn, but that does not mean they are voting with enthusiasm.
“Keir Starmer’s goal was to stop giving people reasons to vote against Labour, and he has been very successful in doing that,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham in the UK. “He’s not very good at giving people reasons to vote Labour.”
That sense of incompleteness pervades even Mr Starmer’s admirers. Despite spending hours researching his biography, Mr Baldwin said there was “something a little bit unapproachable” about the Labour leader. “He’s a very attached person and he doesn’t trust easily,” Mr Baldwin said. “He doesn’t have emotional diarrhoea.”
While Mr Starmer has begun to talk more about his personal story, his frequent references to being “the son of a toolmaker” growing up in a “semi-permanent house” – his modest family home – could come across as superficial, even robotic.
“He doesn’t see why he needs to expose himself and all his inner workings to the public,” said Mr Baldwin, who said he sometimes struggled to get more than monosyllable answers from Mr Starmer to personal questions. On one occasion, he recalled asking him to elaborate on his feelings about an incident that had distressed him.
The answer was short, direct and not very helpful. “I was very upset,” Mr Starmer said, according to his biographer.
