WHO IS KEIR STARMER, THE SELF-DESCRIBED SOCIALIST SET TO LEAD THE U.K.? SOME BRITS STILL DON’T KNOW.

LONDON — Barring an almighty upset, Keir Starmer will become British prime minister Friday, his Labour Party ousting the ruling Conservatives after 14 years.

But for a man on the verge of ruling this key American ally, the world’s sixth-largest economy, there is little consensus about what kind of leader Starmer, 61, will become or even what kind of man he is.

He has the most blue-collar upbringing of any candidate in a generation while at the same time being the first since the 1950s to already have the title “Sir” after having been knighted by the monarchy. He is a vegetarian and a self-described socialist but also a hate figure for many leftists who accuse him of veering rightward in search of power. And while friends describe him as an affable but hypercompetitive soccer fanatic, in public he often appears stiff and lacking charisma.

Ultimately, the biggest paradox is that Starmer might be about to win a landslide while much of public opinion about him is lukewarm. 

For those who do have views on Starmerism, there are two general camps: Supporters say he deftly mixes progressive values with real-world pragmatism; critics argue he is an apolitical shape-shifter who will say whatever’s fashionable and necessary to win.

Leftists say Starmer first betrayed them in 2020 when he ran for the Labour leadership. He campaigned on a now notorious set of “10 pledges,” which included reviewing arms sales, taxing the rich and bringing utilities under public ownership. 

“The 10 pledges were a really good, comprehensive pitch, and they represented a lot of what I cared about,” said Laura Parker, an ex-adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran socialist who preceded Starmer as leader.

She was among the 40% of Corbyn backers who were wooed by Starmer’s progressive platform. However, Starmer has since abandoned all of those pledges.

Parker remembers feeling “a growing sense of frustration” when she realized Starmerism was a moveable feast. “There have been a few moments when I found it particularly difficult,” she said, with some moments leaving “me shaking my head at the radio.”

Not being defined by an ideology has allowed Starmer to move “quite fast and ruthlessly,” said Tom Baldwin, a former senior Labour adviser who wrote the sympathetic “Keir Starmer: The Biography.”

The same “lack of politics” has its drawbacks, Baldwin added. Leadership is about “building alliances, working out what makes people tick and carrying people through tough times,” he said. “I don’t think he necessarily has the performative skill to do that.”

'My father was a toolmaker'

For those who believe in Starmerism, its kernel can be found in a row of bland, semidetached houses fringing a wildflower meadow in the countryside south of London.

It was here in the rural, Conservative town of Oxted that he grew up with his father, Rodney, who worked as a toolmaker, and his mother, Josephine, a nurse with the publicly funded National Health Service. As die-hard lefties, they named Starmer after Keir Hardie, who founded Labour in 1893.

Starmer’s paternal relationship was difficult, he told Baldwin and other interviewers. His late father was a gruff, brooding presence who spent what little emotional capital he had on his mother, who suffered from a rare form of inflammatory arthritis that limited her mobility.

“We didn’t have a lot when we were growing up,” he said in a speech June 13. “I know what it feels like to be embarrassed to bring your mates home because the carpet is threadbare and the windows cracked.”

He is far from the first politician to use a bootstrap upbringing to burnish his credentials. But advisers say they had to urge Starmer, a reluctant technocrat — all fashionable eyeglasses, bequiffed hair and lawyerly suits — to deploy those relatable, homespun stories.

Now there’s no stopping him. He says “my father was a toolmaker” so often that it has become something of a meme.

His siblings, two sisters and a brother, called him “superboy” because he excelled at everything: school, soccer and the flute. And he became the first person in his family to attend college, studying law at the University of Leeds, in north England.

Starmer plays down other details — and not just the time police caught him illegally selling ice creams on the French Riviera when he was a student.

Studying for a postgraduate law degree at Oxford, he wrote for the hard-left magazine Socialist Alternatives — a fleeting legacy now attacked from both right and left.

In 2020, the right-leaning Times newspaper labeled him a “radical” who wrote for a “Marxist journal.” Magazine founder Benji Schoendorff is no more charitable.

“The guy is an empty suit,” he said in a YouTube seminar last month. “I say it on a political level, because personally I really like the guy.”

By the 1990s Starmer had become a star human rights lawyer, working on cases against McDonald’s and Shell and opposing the death penalty. It was even rumored he was the inspiration for Mark Darcy, the love interest played by Colin Firth in 2001’s “Bridget Jones’ Diary.”

Many of his former allies were outraged when, in 2008, he was appointed head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Britain’s government prosecutor, in their eyes becoming an instrument of the very state power they had spent their professional lives fighting.

From there he became an MP in 2015.

'We want to be a party of power'

It was a chaotic party under Corbyn, who hailed from the unpolished far left and enraged many colleagues. Starmer held several senior roles but also participated in a failed plot to topple Corbyn, finally replacing him in 2020 after Labour suffered a colossal defeat to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“It’s hard to overstate how much that election had damaged the party,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former policy guru, said in an interview. “Morale was at rock bottom, its spirit and purpose had been broken,” and it was 26 points behind in the polls.

Supporters say Starmer’s remaking of Labour — now 20 points ahead — shows he can enact radical change. It has become a sleek, professionalized electoral force, while Starmer has cast himself as Corbyn’s antithesis.

Corbyn attracted legions of young progressives while repelling older social conservatives. He was also accused of allowing antisemitism to metastasize among his pro-Palestinian followers, leading many British Jews to vow they could never vote for him.

Shamed by that record, Starmer has adopted a zero-tolerance policy on antisemitism, supporters say, kicking out members, including Corbyn himself. 

Meanwhile he has sought to rebrand Labour as economically responsible, tough on immigration and unafraid to unfurl the Union Flag, which for some is a cliché and for others  a nationalist dog whistle.

“We gave up on being a party of protest five years ago — we want to be a party of power,” Starmer said in a speech last month, repeating that he hates the powerlessness of opposition.

That singular pursuit of office has involved several high-profile U-turns aside from the 10 pledges, from Brexit and college tuition fees to social security and child benefits. He is unashamedly ruthless, Baldwin said, and critics have accused him of unfairly purging left-wing lawmakers.

Even though Starmer has such a huge lead, many pundits have reached for an old political adage to describe his cautious approach, casting him as a man terrified of dropping a priceless Ming vase. And plenty of critics have pilloried him for being too cautious about everything from taxes to being too slow to back a cease-fire in Gaza.

Starmerists retort that the world has changed from 2020 to 2024 and that their man has changed with it. Far from those 10 pledges, his platform is based on five, far more modest “missions” on economic growth, clean energy, education, crime and health care.

'Anything at any time'

Still, Starmer’s advisers and allies have struggled to convey the everyman who they insist lurks just behind the curtain.

He is an Arsenal-supporting soccer fanatic who still enjoys a pint among locals at The Pineapple, an antique pub built in 1868 in north London’s affluent Kentish Town. His wife, Victoria, 61, trained as a lawyer and now works for the NHS. Untraditionally low profile, she has never given an interview. And together they have a teenage son and daughter, who, according to Baldwin’s book, poke fun at their dad over breakfast before the school run.

And yet this character has not cut through for many voters. Tracking by the pollster YouGov found that more people have negative than positive opinions about Starmer on decisiveness, trustworthiness and likability.

Political flair may have been trained out of him in the courtroom, where judge-led cases are won on evidence, not charm, Baldwin and others suggest. In any case, after the roller coaster of the Johnson-Corbyn years, Britain could do with a dose of boring competency, others argue.

Whether that is true or not, it is certain that a chunk of this Thursday’s vote will be driven not by any love for Starmerism but by a repudiation of the historically unpopular Conservatives.

Fourteen years in power have ended not only with a country that in many ways feels broken, but also a party known for scandals and missteps rather than any overriding policy achievement.

Obvious parallels have been drawn between Starmer and Tony Blair, a centrist former lawyer who led Britain out of the doldrums of the 1990s and won a historic landslide victory for Labour.

Iain Duncan Smith, who led the Conservatives from 2001 to 2003 and was one of Blair’s main sparring partners, vehemently disagrees.

“Starmer is this gray figure who seems to have been anything at any time depending on which way the wind was blowing,” he said. “The people I respect and remember are those that actually changed the weather themselves: One of those was Tony Blair.”

As with many other Conservatives, Smith acknowledged that his party will most likely be swept out of power Thursday. But that, he said, is not due to any real affection for Starmer. 

“I don’t think that anybody loves Labour at the moment,” he said. “They’re pissed off at the Tories.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

2024-07-03T09:10:26Z dg43tfdfdgfd