Keir Starmer: Britain’s new PM shaped by a distant father and deep ‘love’ for Ireland

The frequency with which Keir Starmer referred to his late father’s occupation as a toolmaker became a running joke during the UK’s general election campaign. The Labour leader, Britain’s new prime minister, threw it in at every available opportunity to underline his working-class roots.

People who know Starmer well say his father gave him more than a handy election soundbite. Rodney Starmer, an early supporter of the politics of Labour’s former left-wing standard-bearer Jeremy Corbyn, gave his son his early interest in socialism. He also gave him a disdain for the Thatcherite policies that ruined the trade union power of skilled workers such as toolmakers.

The new prime minister’s father, who died in 2018, gave him his fastidiousness, his penchant for detail. He also gave him a bluntness that insiders say contributes to an occasionally high-handed dismissiveness of others in private, especially those who are late or unprepared for meetings.

By the prime minister’s own account, Rodney Starmer was a cold, distant father and their stilted relationship gave his son the air of diffidence and emotional constipation that has shaped his public image as a slightly awkward politician, if now a wildly successful one after this week’s election win.

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The things his father gave him and, just as importantly, the things that he did not – warmth, a loving embrace – have helped to mould Starmer into the man he is and the prime minister that he will be.

“I think he is still trying to work through the aftermath of his relationship with his father,” said one senior Labour figure this week. “Understand the ramifications of that, and you will understand Keir.”

This week Starmer and the Labour Party, which he says he changed since taking it over in 2020, swept the Tories from power after 14 years. Labour now has a mandate to change Britain, a nation that in the post-Brexit years has been riven with division and uncertainty over its past, present and future.

Yet as he sets out on his mission to reshape the troubled country he has inherited from outgoing premier Rishi Sunak, Starmer (61) is still something of an enigma for most people in Britain, including some of the people closest to him. Among the few things widely known about him among the British public is that he is a huge Arsenal fan – his love of football is central to his self-image.

“There’s still something slightly unreachable about him,” said Tom Baldwin, a journalist and former Labour Party adviser who wrote a biography of Starmer earlier this year.

Speaking when he was publicising the book, Keir Starmer: The Biography, earlier this year, Baldwin said the Labour leader had originally recruited him to ghostwrite an autobiography in Starmer’s voice. The politician later pulled out of the project but agreed to co-operate with Baldwin on a biography written by the journalist.

“He was very uncomfortable doing the book. He actually said: ‘I’m worried it’s going to make me look like a w**ker’,” said Baldwin. “One of the things he finds most uncomfortable about being a politician is the need to put himself out there all the time.”

[ Keir Starmer says burden has been lifted off shoulders of ‘our great nation’ ]

Baldwin agreed that Starmer’s relationship with his father and also with his late mother, Josephine, a former nurse who gave her son the warmth that Rodney Starmer couldn’t, have helped to define the prime minister.

Josephine Starmer, who had a lifelong illness that left her in constant pain and with reduced mobility, died in 2015, days before her son was elected for the first time to the House of Commons. The prime minister has spoken publicly and uncharacteristically eloquently of his love for her, and how her experiences shaped his views on the importance of Britain’s cherished National Health Service (NHS).

“His childhood was traumatic for him. He is not the only politician to have experienced such things. But I think the way it affected him is an integral component of his make-up now,” said Baldwin.

Another thing that has helped shaped Starmer is his relationship with Ireland. He has no known Irish ancestry, no Hibernian distant cousins tucked away in some small midlands town that he could roll out for electoral advantage. Yet Britain’s prime minister professes a deep “love” for Ireland, borne of his four years between 2003 and 2007 working as a lawyer advising the Northern Ireland Policing Board on human rights. He has said that this time helped him understand the value of political compromise and pragmatism.

Baldwin’s biography includes an account of Starmer arguing with police officers in the North about the merits of Paul Gascoigne versus George Best as footballers over pints of Guinness. There is also an anecdote about how Starmer was caught up in a Belfast riot around July 12th, contributing to his knowledge of the nuances around community tensions in the North.

He still wears a Donegal GAA jersey that he bought during his time in Ireland when he plays football with his friends. His first trip abroad after he got married was to Ireland, which was also the first country he officially visited after he became Labour leader. He has surrounded himself, as it happens, with close advisers who are Irish, such as his campaign director, Corkman Morgan McSweeney, or people whose parents were Irish, such as Sue Gray, who was his chief of staff as leader of the opposition.

Speaking to The Irish Times during the election campaign, Starmer promised to work hard to improve relations with the Republic as prime minister, after years of difficult disagreements between Dublin and London since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

“It’s very important that we work closely with our near neighbours in Ireland,” Starmer said. “I’ve always found that respectful engagement is the way forward in our relations. I hope that with that approach we can make some real progress.”

Starmer was born in 1962, the second eldest of four children. He has an older sister and younger twin siblings, one of whom is his brother Nick, who has learning difficulties and of whom Starmer is said to be fiercely protective.

The family lived in a small pebbledashed house near Oxted in Surrey, south of London. Money was tight. Starmer’s father, who wouldn’t allow his children to have a television or even to speak while eating meals, ensured the atmosphere in the house could be difficult at times. It was thawed only by the warmth of the children’s mother, who showered them with love despite her physical pain.

Starmer stood out for his intelligence as a child and went to a local grammar school, which was allowed to select the brightest of children. He was the only one of his family to go to university, studying law at the University of Leeds and later at Oxford.

He embraced radical left-wing politics after college and as a young barrister. At the height of the Troubles more than 30 years ago, he visited Ireland as a human rights lawyer with a legal advocacy group called the Haldane Society, meeting prisoners at the Maze. In its report, the society said it was “in favour of a united Ireland”. These days, Starmer portrays himself as a defender of the union and has indicated he would actively campaign against Irish reunification in a referendum.

Five years after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, he was recruited to advise the policing board in the North. In 2008, the former human rights lawyer pivoted to work on the other side of the legal fence and was appointed to head Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Starmer has likened this to running a government department and he leaned on this experience to bolster his credentials in the election campaign. He was knighted for his work in the CPS, although he is said to be uncomfortable being referred to as “Sir Keir”.

Baldwin said Starmer’s motivation is “to do something rather than be something” and, increasingly, he began to see politics rather than the law as a vehicle to achieve results. One of his neighbours in north London was the former Labour leader Ed Miliband, who convinced him to run for Westminster. Starmer won his seat in 2015, but the Tories were re-elected to government.

Starmer joined the shadow cabinet of Corbyn, whom his father still admired, but he was never that close to the left-wing leader or his politics, and increasingly drifted towards a more compromising and pragmatic style. When Corbynism imploded following Labour’s 2019 election thumping at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, Starmer replaced him after promising to continue with some of his predecessors’ left-wing policies. Since gaining control, however, he has consistently nudged Labour back towards the centre ground, paving the way for the party’s victory this week.

Starmer is often derided as boring and stodgy, a characterisation that is known to irritate him. Observing him on the campaign trail, it was obvious that he was far warmer and personable dealing with people in small groups face to face and off camera than he was under formal media scrutiny.

“The guy is not perfect,” said Baldwin. “He doesn’t do the performative side of politics. He lacks many of the political skills to do what he wants to do. He talks about leading a decade of national renewal. How are you going to do that if you can’t inspire people?”

Starmer is said to be careful, logical and deliberative in his decision-making, sometimes to a fault. He does not have the same eye for public relations as the Tony Blair regime. He also doesn’t butter up his own MPs too much. Labour insiders say the new prime minister is not universally popular in his own party.

“He won’t go down to Strangers’ Bar [in parliament] and have a drink with them. He would just think: why would you do that?” said Baldwin. “He doesn’t have a faction of Starmerites because he never spent the time building them up. There aren’t many people who would die in a ditch for him.”

Yet since Baldwin made those comments to The Irish Times, Starmer has shown he is endowed with another core political attribute that may help to keep his enlarged parliamentary party onside: he can say he is a sure-fire electoral winner. That matters.

“Perhaps the attributes that don’t make him a good politician might make him a good prime minister. He won’t be bound to a faction.”

Baldwin said Starmer found opposition “like being in a prison cell, marking off the days until he can get out and do something. He will want to do his talking on the pitch.”

Britain’s new prime minister is known to cherish his close friendships, many of which have persisted for most of his life. He is also very protective of the privacy of his family, including his wife, fellow lawyer Victoria Starmer, and their two teenage children, with whom they have never been publicly photographed. Senior Labour insiders say they are still unsure whether the family will move full-time into Downing Street or remain in their north London home.

Starmer has spoken often of the importance he places on his own role as a father and of creating a loving environment for his children. He wants to give them what he felt he was denied by his own father. Yet Starmer has also spoken of how, now, he partially understands why his father was so emotionally cold. Rodney needed all of his emotional dexterity to care for his wife, Josephine, to whom he was devoted.

When Starmer’s father lay dying in 2018, he visited him, imbued with an urge to emotionally reconcile – they had been civil to each other for years. The tender scene is laid out in Baldwin’s book.

“Any chance Dad and I might have had to speak properly – to sort everything out – had gone. We hadn’t hugged each other for years. I thought about trying to put my arms around him in that hospital room but – no – it wasn’t what we did,” Starmer told Baldwin. “I knew he was dying and I didn’t turn around to go back and tell him what I thought. And I should have done.”

After Rodney died, Starmer discovered a scrapbook that his father had secretly kept of press clippings of his son’s achievements. His father was proud of him, but could never find a way to say it.

As prime minister, Starmer knows he will face scrutiny like he never has before. It will be uncomfortable for him. The personal, unyielding attributes that his father bestowed upon him, for good and ill, will be among the tools that he has at his disposal as tries to reshape Britain.

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