After the 2019 election debacle, he succeeded Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party and moved the party further to the right.
Keir Starmer is the lawyer turned politician who managed to pull Labour out of its wilderness journey after fourteen years of Conservative rule in Britain.
Since the Conservative Party began the process of dismantling the Conservative Party last term (first with Boris Johnson’s parties, then with Liz Truss’s budget disaster and finally with Rishi Sunak’s political inexperience), Starmer has been clear that all it would take is one mistake of his own to deprive us of the chance to remove him from power.
To be honest, Starmer hasn’t changed an inch ideologically in years. Budgetary discipline, accounting rigour, achievable promises and seriousness in management are the core of the message.
He was born in 1962 in Surrey, south London, a traditionally bourgeois and conservative area where, according to his biography, he always felt a little out of place.
The figure of his father, a craftsman with strong left-wing convictions, is of paramount importance to him. He maintained a huge emotional distance from his four children, while outside of work he devoted all his energy to caring for his wife Jo, who suffered from a rare auto-inflammatory disease.
He studied at the University of Leeds and later at Oxford, where he became fascinated by the defence of human rights.
In 2008, he became head of the Crown Prosecution Service after building a reputation as a human rights lawyer. Six years later, he left the Crown Prosecution Service to make the leap into politics as a Labour candidate for a central London constituency in the 2015 election.
He quickly caught the attention of Corbyn, who first brought him into his team as a spokesperson for Immigration and later for the BrexitAfter the leader’s resignation following his resounding electoral defeat in 2019, Starmer positioned himself as a unity candidate in the primaries and was elected to rebuild the party.
Compared to his predecessor Corbyn, he has turned the party further to the right and laminated the entire critical sector of the party.
Source: EITB
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
