Who is Keir Starmer, the Labor leader favored to win the July 4 British elections?

LONDON (AP) — Respectful, managerial, a little boring — Keir Starmer is no one’s idea of ​​a firebrand politician.

Labor hopes this is exactly what Britain wants and needs after 14 turbulent years of Tory rule. Starmer, the 61-year-old leader of the center-left party, is the current favorite to win the country’s July 4 elections.

Starmer spent four years as opposition leader dragging his social democratic party from the left towards the political middle ground. His message to voters is that a Labor government will bring change – reassuring rather than frightening.

“A vote for Labor is a vote for stability – economic and political,” Starmer said after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the election on May 22.

If opinion polls giving Labor a consistent double-digit lead are confirmed on election day, Starmer will become Britain’s first Labor prime minister since 2010.

A lawyer who served as chief prosecutor of England and Wales between 2008 and 2013, Starmer is caricatured by his opponents as a “left-wing London lawyer”. He was knighted for his role as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and Tory opponents like to use his title, Sir Keir Starmer, to portray him as elite and out of touch with reality.

Starmer prefers to emphasize his everyman credentials and humble roots – in implicit contrast to Sunak, who is a former Goldman Sachs banker married to the daughter of a billionaire.

He loves football – he still plays the sport at the weekend – and loves nothing more than watching Premier League team Arsenal over a beer in his local pub. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children whom they work to keep out of the public eye.

Born in 1963, Starmer is the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who named him after Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labor Party. One of four children, he grew up in a cash-strapped family in a small town outside London.

“There have been difficult times,” he said in a speech launching his campaign. “I know what uncontrolled inflation feels like, how the rising cost of living can make you afraid of the postman coming your way: ‘Is he going to bring another bill that we can’t pay? ?’

“We used to go with the phone bill because when it was cut off it was always the easiest way to get by without it. »

Starmer’s mother suffered from a chronic illness, Still’s disease, which left her in pain, and Starmer said visiting her in hospital and helping to care for her helped give her strong support for the state-funded National Health Service.

He was the first in his family to go to university, studying law at Leeds and Oxford, and practising human rights law before being appointed chief prosecutor.

He entered politics in his 50s and was elected to Parliament in 2015. He has often been at odds with party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a staunch socialist, at one point quitting the party leadership over disagreements, but agreed to serve as Labor’s Brexit spokesperson under Corbyn.

Starmer faced repeated questions about the decision and about urging voters to support Corbyn in the 2019 election.

He said he wanted to stay and fight to change the Labor Party, arguing that “leaders are temporary, but political parties are permanent”.

After Corbyn led Labor to election defeats in 2017 and 2019 – the latter the party’s worst result since 1935 – Labor chose Starmer to lead the rebuilding effort.

His leadership coincided with a period of turbulence that saw Britain weather the COVID-19 pandemic, leave the EU, absorb the economic shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and endure economic turmoil due to Liz Truss’s turbulent 49-day term as Prime Minister in 2022.

Voters are tired of the cost of living crisis, a wave of public sector strikes and the political unrest that saw the Conservative Party dispatch two prime ministers in a matter of weeks in 2022 – Boris Johnson and Truss – before ‘install Sunak to try to stabilize the ship.

Starmer imposed discipline on a party with a well-deserved reputation for internal division, abandoned some of Corbyn’s most overtly socialist policies and apologized for anti-Semitism that an internal investigation found may have spread under Corbyn .

Starmer promised “a cultural change within the Labor Party”. His mantra now is “campaign before party”.

Starmer was a staunch opponent of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union but now says a Labour government would not seek to reverse that decision.

Critics say this demonstrates a lack of political principle. Supporters say it is pragmatic and respects the fact that British voters have little desire to return to the contentious Brexit debate.

Starmer must now persuade voters that a Labor government can ease Britain’s chronic housing crisis and repair its fraying public services, particularly the creaking health service – but without imposing tax rises or piling on the debt public.

To the dismay of some Labor supporters, he watered down his promise to spend billions investing in green technology, saying a Labor government would not borrow more to fund public spending.

“A lot of people on the left will accuse him of letting them down, of betraying socialist principles. And a lot of people on the right are accusing him of flip-flopping,” said Tim Bale, a political scientist at Queen Mary University of London.

“But hey, if that’s what it takes to win, then I think that tells you something about Starmer’s character. He will do whatever it takes – and he has done whatever it takes – to get into government.

The party has risen in the polls under his leadership, helping to keep Starmer’s internal critics in the camp.

At the party conference in October, he showed a flash of passion when he told enthusiastic delegates: “I grew up working class. I have fought all my life. And I won’t stop now. He also showed remarkable composure when a protester rushed on stage and showered Starmer with glitter and glue.

Some have compared this election to that of 1997, when Tony Blair led Labor to a landslide victory after 18 years of Conservative rule.

Bale says Starmer doesn’t have Blair’s charisma. But, he added, “given the turmoil that Britons have had to endure since the Brexit referendum in 2016, a bit of boredom would not be so unwelcome, I think, by the public.”

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Associated Press writer Danica Kirka contributed to this story.