Keir Starmer is set to become the UK’s prime minister after leading the Labour Party to a landslide victory in the 2024 UK general election. Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn four years ago, and has worked to shift the party from Corbyn’s far-left line to a more centrist one, in order to make it more electable to voters in the UK.
Keir Starmer was elected to the British Parliament not so early in life, in his fifties, after a distinguished career as a lawyer. However, he had a clear interest in politics, and also had extreme left-wing leanings in his youth. Born in 1962 in London, he grew up in Surrey, in the southeast of England, in a family with four children.
Starmer often says that his roots run deep in the working class. His father was a factory turner, his mother a nurse. The family were staunch Labour supporters, and chose for him to be named after the first Labour leader, Keir Hardie, a coal miner.
Starmer had a troubled family life. He says his father was a cold man who wanted to stay away, and his mother suffered for most of her life from an autoimmune disease that left her unable to walk or talk, and doctors then had to amputate her leg.
At the age of sixteen, he joined the youth cadres of the local branch of the Labour Party in his area, and for a time wrote and edited the magazine Socialist Alternatives.
Starmer was the first in his family to go to university. He studied law at Leeds and Oxford universities in the UK, and then worked as a human rights lawyer. During that time he campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in African and Caribbean countries.
He also defended a famous case in the 1990s, in which two environmental activists were sued by a well-known fast-food chain, McDonald’s, for defamation. In 2008, Starmer became the Director of Public Prosecutions, then became the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and the Crown Prosecution Service. He remained in that high-profile position until 2013, and was knighted the following year.