Meet the new British Prime Minister who wants to ‘make Britain serious again’

The landslide victory of Britain’s new self-proclaimed “socialist” prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer – a long-time lawyer before entering politics in his fifties – will test his promise of “change”.

In the run-up to the snap election on 4 July, he campaigned not only on transforming the future of the UK, but also on the promise that Labour itself had changed under his leadership since he took over in 2020.

“I know there are a lot of people who haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for in this election. They’re fed up with the failure, the chaos and the division of the Conservatives, but they still have questions about us: has the Labour Party changed enough?” the 61-year-old acknowledged in a speech in May, as reported by the BBC. “Do I trust them with my money, our borders, our security? My answer is yes, you can, because I’ve changed this party permanently.”

He sees the prospect of a Labour victory as a chance to “make Britain serious again,” he told the Financial Times before the election. “There is a constant level of seriousness that the whole country badly needs.”

He also believes his title “Mister” distracts him from his true background, he said in the same interview, noting that “it’s important for me to remind people that my father was a toolmaker and my mother was a nurse.”

The victory will also provide Labour with an opportunity to show whether it has overcome much of the anti-Semitism that notoriously marred it during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader before Mr Starmer took over in 2020. “The first thing I said as leader of the Labour Party was that I would tear anti-Semitism out of our party by the roots, that was my first solemn promise, and I have kept it,” he told SkyNews earlier this year.

He warned that anti-Semitism would take “a new form” after the October 7 massacres and vowed to “never let anti-Semitism creep back into the Labour Party.” Before the election, Mr Starmer’s platform appeared to be influencing some Jewish voters, with one poll indicating that 46% of British Jews planned to vote Labour, more than the 42% of the general population who said they would do the same.

Many members of Mr Starmer’s wife’s family are Jewish, and he told the Guardian that the October 7 massacres had affected relatives living in Israel. However, he also said it was “extremely important” that Palestine be recognised as a state, noting that “we need a viable Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel, and recognition has to be part of that”.