Sober, pragmatic, even boring: who is Keir Starmer, the next English Prime Minister who never makes a mistake

Arsenal fan, pescetarian, former human rights lawyer: who is the "nerd" who led Labor to triumph in Brexit-ravaged Britain

ROME – Sir Keir Starmer has a cat, his name is Jojo. He says he is an atheist. His wife Vic converted him to the pescatarian diet. Support Arsenal. He frequents (goes to) a pub, the Pineapple, in the Kentish Town district, where he always has the “usual”: amber Marston’s, at most a Negroni. He will be the next British Prime Minister. Labor have won the elections by a landslide, 19 years after the last time, with a record result. And he, this gentle man who hasn’t made half a mistake so far, can claim the paternity of the electoral triumph.

The narrative of the “character” Starmer contrasts in temperature and pantone with the increasingly “extreme” stories of the winners (or favourites) in elections around the world: left-wing, moderate, respectable, sober . It’s anticlimactic, Starmer. A profile of rejection of Brexit.

Born in south London (in 1962), raised in Oxted, a town in Surrey, of humble origins: a deeply Labor family, mother Josephine a nurse, father Rodney a worker. Economic difficulties. Starmer is a self-made man that Americans would love. At the top of the class, it is said that he defended his brother who was bullied for his learning difficulties with his fists. Graduated in law at the University of Leeds, then specialized at Oxford. Human rights lawyer. A clear path towards a political career, without the shadows that these days almost favor the rise. He even has boring traits, but which evidently pay off after turbulent years. He behaved, you know immediately, like a “prime minister in waiting”. The wait lasted very little.

In 2008 he married Victoria Alexander, a woman of Jewish origins whom he met during the 1997 election campaign for Tony Blair. He became chief Crown prosecutor, and was elected to Westminster for the first time in 2015. In Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow government he was a minister for immigration, then contact person for Brexit. In 2020 he rose to the top of the Labor Party, elected in the first round with 56.2% of the votes, and cleared it of the anti-Semitic infiltrations inherited from Corbyn. He said he would bring them back to government within a single legislature. Done.

If the Economist’s assumption is valid – “Prime ministers govern with the spirit of their previous work. Boris Johnson a columnist in newspapers; Rishi Sunak in finance” – then Starmer should keep on his agenda the requests as a lawyer for the human rights, and its proletarian origins. He is still a baptized Keir in homage to Keir Hardie, Scottish trade unionist and first leader of the Labor Party. In Oxford he collaborated with the magazine of a Marxist collective, called Socialist Alternatives. As a lawyer he defended in court the protesters arrested during the repression of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing governments. He worked pro bono for the Death Penalty Project, the NGO that deals with the legal representation of those sentenced to death: he won an appeal in Uganda, saving the lives of more than 400 people. As Attorney General of the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales, he decided not to prosecute the parents of Daniel James, a paralyzed boy who chose assisted suicide in Switzerland. A choice that is still valid as a legal precedent in Great Britain today.

While in France we are going to the second round with the far right climbing vertically, in Germany the AfD is advancing, in the United States Trump dominates the race for the White House, here comes the possible from Great Britain outside Europe symbol of the moderate and pro-European left.