Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after an exit poll handed the Labour Party landslide victory on Thursday.
The exit poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, indicated late Thursday that Labour was on course to win a majority seats in the British House of Commons. It indicates that Starmer would replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took office less than two years ago.
Starmer, 61 led a remarkable shift for the Labour Party, which just a few years ago suffered its worst electoral loss since the 1930s. He has pulled the party to the political centre while highlighting the shortcomings of three Conservative prime ministers.
Jill Rutter, who researches for the London research group U.K. in a Changing Europe, said “He has been ferociously — some would say tediously — boring in his discipline…He’s not going to set hearts racing, but he does look relatively prime-ministerial.”
Left-wing Starmer grew up in a working-class family in Surrey, outside London and became the first college graduate in his family, studying first at Leeds University, and then law at Oxford.
Named after Keir Hardie, a trade unionist who was Labour’s first leader. He was defence counsel for protesters accused of libel by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, and he later rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was awarded a knighthood.
In 2015, he was elected to Parliament, succeeding the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020. He ditched Corbyn’s plan to nationalise Britain’s energy companies and promised to not increase taxes on working families. He also committed to supporting Britain’s military, hoping to banish an anti-patriotic label that clung to Labour during the Corbyn time.
Starmer also rooted out the antisemitism that had contaminated the party’s ranks under Corbyn. Although he has not linked that to his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.