The man may become the next prime minister of the U.K

A Conversation with Mr. Starmer About his Legal and Political Careers and the Implications for the British Parliament, the High Courts, and the First Prime Minister

A closer look at Mr. Starmer’s back story disproves the narrative. His politics are, in fact, relatively coherent and consistent. Their cardinal feature is loyalty to the British state. In practice, this often means coming down hard on those who threaten it. Mr. Starmer acted on behalf of powerful people in his legal and political career. He is now set to carry that instinct into government. The implications for Britain, a country in need of renewal not retrenchment, are dire.

Mr. Starmer’s legal career and motives are never made known, but he has never talked about his personal motives. But it seems clear, based on his track record, that Mr. Starmer’s outlook began to take shape around the turn of the millennium. By that time, he had gained a reputation as a progressive barrister who worked pro bono for trade unionists and environmentalists. He surprised many of his colleagues when he agreed to defend a British soldier who had shot and killed a Catholic teenager. Four years later, he was hired as a human rights adviser to the Northern Irish Policing Board — a role in which he reportedly helped police officers justify the use of guns, water cannons and plastic bullets.

A human rights lawyer is the likely next Prime Minister of Britain, despite once calling for the abolition of the monarchy.

Rodney Starmer: From a 17-year old lawyer to a lawyer character in the Bridget Jones novel: Big McDonald’s

He was the inspiration for a male character in the movies about a woman trying to escape her past. More recently, he took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter.

Starmer promises, if elected, to restore competency to government, nationalize some railways and utility companies, raise the minimum wage, tax private school tuition, improve the public health system and offer free breakfast in public elementary schools.

His parents were “proper old-fashioned socialists” who may have named their son after Keir Hardie, a 19th century Scottish trade unionist, who founded the Labour Party in 1900, says Tom Baldwin, author of Keir Starmer: The Biography. (Starmer said in 2015 that while his parents admired Hardie and voted Labour, they never explicitly confirmed whom he’s named after, and have since died.)

At the age of 16, Starmer joined the Young Socialists, the youth wing of the Labour Party. He grew up and became a human rights lawyer, fighting cases against oil companies and McDonald’s.

Rodney Starmer was a toolmaker who people didn’t understand was skilled and clever because they thought he worked in a factory, and he hated them for it, says Baldwin.

He has a difficult relationship with his father. “We didn’t talk. He never really expressed pride in what I did. He didn’t say he loved you. Starmer said in a recent radio interview.

His mother Josephine was a nurse in Britain’s National Health Service, or NHS. She was also chronically ill herself, in and out of the hospital with Still’s disease, an autoinflammatory condition. Her health struggles are something Starmer now recalls often in speeches, as instilling in him the importance of the NHS, which provides free, taxpayer-funded health care for all.

For years, unverified rumors have swirled that Starmer was the inspiration for the brooding lawyer character of Mark Darcy, love interest of the main character in the Bridget Jones book and movie franchise. It’s plausible that Starmer and Darcy are human rights lawyers. Starmer lived in Oxford and Leeds, just like the series’ creator, Helen Fielding. Around the time of the firstBridget Jones novel, Starmer’s big McDonald’s litigation was making headlines.

On the podcasts in 2020 Fielding was happy to keep people guessing. She had several different boyfriends. But she later told another interviewer that she’d never met Starmer.

Source: Who is Keir Starmer? A look at the man likely to become the next U.K. prime minister

The Story of Keir Starmer: How a Left-Right Defender Revisited his Left-Wing Labour Party Worked

He worked as a human rights lawyer for about 20 years, and served as an adviser to police in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Peace Agreement, signed in 1998. But then he switched sides and became a prosecutor. He was the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales for five years.

That switch — from defending people accused of being criminals, to prosecuting them — is something that annoyed some of Starmer’s left-wing human rights colleagues, his biographer says.

“He’d set himself up as railing against the state — a sort of self-consciously radical person. But then he slowly changed, to where he could exercise more influence,” says Baldwin. “He adopted a more authoritarian approach to crime.”

Starmer argued that faster trials for offenders were better for crime than long prison sentences when riots broke out in London in 2011.

In 2014, Starmer received a knighthood for his criminal justice work, becoming Sir Keir. At his knighthood ceremony, Starmer — once caught on camera calling for the British monarchy to be abolished — knelt before Charles, then the prince of Wales, who tapped him on both shoulders with a sword.

I poked him in the back and said that I was Keir Starmer. And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Carolyn Harris, a member of Parliament from Wales, recalls that she promised to make her leader of the Labour Party. He smiled, and then said that we need to have a cup of tea and talk about it.

She says she saw a pragmatist who was willing to do what it took to get elected. In order to move the party toward the center, it is necessary to remove the leadership from the left wing of the party.

After five years, Starmer was chosen by Labour colleagues to lead them, succeeding him as leader. But then he swiftly suspended Corbyn from the party, following accusations of antisemitism. Corbyn remained in Parliament as an independent.

If elected, the Labour Party has promised to improve relations with Europe, tax private school tuition, ban the sale of gas and diesel cars by 2030 and restore competence to government.

But Starmer’s lead in the polls may be less about his party’s platform, or his own charisma. He has been dubbed a boring person by some British headlines. A recent poll shows more people dislike his handling of the party than they do like it.

A Labour victory would say more about voters’ disgust with the governing Conservatives, says Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. “Boring looks quite good after Boris [Johnson] and Liz Truss! I think a lot of people want somebody who’s going to manage things in a sober and sensible way.”

Starmer will have to manage expectations. He takes a country that is hobbled by years of Conservative-backed austerity measures, and that has no money to spend.