London: Keir Starmer is set to become Britain’s next prime minister after his Labour Party hurled towards a landslide majority on Friday in the parliamentary elections and dealt a bruising defeat for incumbent premier Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party.
As Labour crossed the halfway mark of 650 constituencies to clinch the minimum 326 required for a majority in Parliament, Starmer, 61, stepped up to make his victory speech in London just hours away from formally becoming the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
“We did it, you campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it and now it has arrived, change begins now,” declared Starmer to a cheering crowd, promising that the work begins right away.
Mr. Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer, has led a remarkable turnaround for the Labour Party, which just a few years ago suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s. He has pulled the party to the political center while capitalizing on the failings of three Conservative prime ministers.
“He has been ferociously — some would say tediously — boring in his discipline,” Jill Rutter, a research fellow at the London research group U.K. in a Changing Europe. “He’s not going to set hearts racing, but he does look relatively prime-ministerial.”
Starmer was raised in a left-wing, working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He was not close with his father; his mother, a nurse, suffered a debilitating illness that took her in and out of the hospital. Mr. Starmer became the first college graduate in his family, studying first at Leeds University, and then law at Oxford.
He was named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist who was Labour’s first leader. As a young lawyer, he represented protesters accused of libel by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, and he later rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was awarded a knighthood.
Elected to Parliament in 2015, he succeeded the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020 and began remaking the party. He dropped Mr. Corbyn’s proposal to nationalize Britain’s energy companies and promised not to raise taxes on working families. He also committed to supporting Britain’s military, hoping to banish an anti-patriotic label that clung to Labour during the Corbyn era.
Starmer also rooted out the antisemitism that had contaminated the party’s ranks under Mr. Corbyn. Though he has not drawn a link between that and his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.
