He has now led the Labor Party to victory, on the way to the largest majority in Parliament.
On the eve of the polls opening for the UK general election, Keir Starmer allowed himself a moment to reflect on how far he had come since becoming leader of the Labor Party four and a half years ago. At that time, the party suffered one of the worst defeats in its 100-year history.
“Optimists say it will take 10 years to fix this party and get it back on its feet,” he told reporters before a final rally in the East Midlands. “The naysayers said we will never fix this party, that it will never be in government again.” adding “Here we are.”
He has now led the Labor Party to victory, en route to the biggest majority in Parliament since at least the landslide victory of Tony Blair’s New Labor in 1997.
The UK’s presumptive prime minister far exceeded expectations of his chances when he replaced far-left Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2020. Bland, boring, “not Tony Blair” as focus groups often describe him, this relatively newcomer to the world of politics has been, in part, a beneficiary of circumstances.
Boris Johnson’s “partygate” scandal and Liz Truss’s “mini-budget” – which sent the pound plummeting – came at the end of years of Tory austerity that saw deep cuts to many public services. Everyone contributed to the result we have now seen in the British general election. But Starmer also had his role to play, demonstrating a quiet ruthlessness in changing his party, purging the Corbynistas, even expelling Corbyn himself, and putting him in a position to win and govern again.
“It feels good, I have to be honest,” Starmer told Labor supporters in London after the party passed the crucial threshold of 326 seats in the House of Commons, adding that he knew “a mandate like this comes with great responsibility”.
He will now have to show whether the same skills that got him to 10 Downing St. will help him solve an impressive list of challenges. Britons are smarting from the impact of Brexit, the pandemic and a historic crisis in living standards. His government faces a more dangerous world and has little money to spend on improving the situation at home without raising broad-based taxes, something he has said he does not want to do.
Despite being known as “Sir Keir” – he was knighted for his legal career before entering politics – the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had humble beginnings, something he strove to remind voters throughout the election campaign. He grew up, as he often tells it, in a semi-detached house “rounded with stones” in Oxted, a suburban London town in rural Surrey. He was one of four children born to a toolmaker father and a mother with a debilitating autoimmune disease, which meant she had to give up work as a nurse while Starmer was a child.
Starmer’s father raised his four children and cared for his sick wife alone, and money was often tight. “I remember when our phone was cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill,” Starmer recalled during the campaign. “How difficult it was to survive.”
Young Starmer gained a head start in life by attending Reigate Grammar, a state school, where he secured the grades to become the first in his family to attend university. He studied law at Leeds, graduating with honors, and was accepted to Oxford University to do a BCL – a prestigious year-long postgraduate law course. As a young man in London in the late 1980s, he lived in a “party flat”, where he sometimes vomited in the bathtub, entertaining friends until the early hours of the morning and writing radical treatises for niche, left-leaning publications. But by day he rose through the ranks to become a respected human rights lawyer.
Starmer, who denied being the inspiration for brash human rights lawyer Mark Darcy in the book and film Bridget Jones’s Diary, became known for his pro bono work, including defending individuals in the Caribbean against the death penalty. He gained national fame for defending two activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, a gardener and a former postman, who were sued for libel by McDonald’s for distributing leaflets criticizing the fast food chain, in what became known as the ‘Affair’ case. McLibel’ . He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002, just months before his 40th birthday.
Keir Starmer as Director of Public Prosecutions in 2010.
The following year, Starmer took on a role that would rewrite his theory of change: human rights advisor to the Policing Board in Northern Ireland. His role was to ensure that the new police service, formed after the 1998 peace agreement, gained the trust of all communities. Before this role, Starmer saw himself as an outside defender of the system. This was his first experience of going into an organization to make changes. He found this new way to be much more effective.
He took on a major, leading role thereafter, becoming Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. The role put him in charge of criminal justice in the UK, managing a large organization of thousands of staff and lawyers during a period of great budget. polite. He led the organization when it successfully sued prominent media figures for phone hacking and politicians for tampering with their expenses.
No one was surprised when the country’s former top prosecutor entered the world of politics. Following the end of his period as DPP, Starmer stood for election in the safe Labor seat of Holborn and St. Pancras at the May 2015 general election, hoping to be Attorney General in Ed Miliband’s cabinet. Instead, he went straight to the opposition benches and joined a parliamentary Labor party that was disintegrating after a shock defeat.
During the Jeremy Corbyn years, Starmer, a Remainer, rose through the shadow ministerial ranks to become Shadow Brexit Secretary. While colleagues such as Rachel Reeves refused to serve under Corbyn or resigned from the party altogether because of antisemitism, Starmer remained. But in March 2018, Starmer and his allies – frustrated by the anti-Semitism problem and Corbyn’s foreign policy positions – knew he would run for party leader when the time came. For nearly two years, they held secret meetings every Monday morning to ensure he was ready for a leadership campaign when the time came.
The time came in 2020. Starmer ran and won, a leadership campaign centered on 10 promises to Labor members, essentially to maintain the radical spirit of the Corbynista agenda with promises such as renationalisation, rail, post, energy and water. He paid a memorable tribute to “my friend Jeremy Corbyn”.
Since taking the leadership, Starmer has expelled Corbyn from the party, introduced mandatory training in antisemitism and vigorously vetted, and sometimes imposed, candidates who will be loyal to his leadership. Encouraged by his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and other close aides on the party’s right, he instilled strict fiscal discipline, abandoned almost all of his original leadership promises, wrapped his party in the union flag and embraced the language of security. discipline and patriotism.
Not everything was easy. He lost the Hartlepool by-election – seeing a safe Labor seat fall to Johnson’s Conservatives – early in his 2020 leadership, after which he considered resigning. The experience caused him to fire some advisers, appoint new people and strengthen his resolve to reform his party.
More recently, Starmer suffered a public and protracted row among his top team over whether to abandon his party’s pledge to spend £28 billion ($36 billion) a year on green infrastructure, culminating in a big reversal. He faced criticism and lost votes over an interview with LBC radio in October in which he said Israel “has the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza, something he later apologized for.
The team of advisers around him has been referred to as a “boys club”, accused of oppression in the purge of the Corbynista wing of the party and its wider attitude towards the party’s elected representatives.
Although his dissidents refuse to see how different he is from the man who ran for leadership four and a half years ago, Starmer is proud of that difference. “I changed parties,” he says. “Now I want to change the country.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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