Keir Starmer is all but certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after a poll predicted a landslide victory for his Labor party in Thursday’s general election.
An exit poll that accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections indicated late Thursday that Labor would win a majority of seats in the British House of Commons. That means Mr Starmer will replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took office two years ago.
A 61-year-old former human rights lawyer, Mr. Starmer has made a remarkable turnaround for Labour, which just a few years ago suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s. He has used the failures of three Conservative prime ministers to drag the party into the political center.
“He’s ferocious — some would say boring — boring in his morals,” Jill Rutter, a London-based think tank on a changing Europe in the UK, told The New York Times recently. “He’s not going to make hearts race, but he looks relatively prime ministerial.”
Mr. Starmer grew up in a left-wing, working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He was not close to the Father; His mother, a nurse, suffered a debilitating illness that landed her in the hospital. Mr. Starmer became the first college graduate in his family, studying law first at the University of Leeds and then at Oxford.
He is named after Keir Hardy, a Scottish unionist who was the first leader of the Labor Party. As a young lawyer, he represented protesters accused of defamation by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, and later rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was awarded a knighthood.
Elected to parliament in 2015, he succeeded left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as Labor leader in 2020 and began reshaping the party. Nationalizing Britain’s energy companies Mr. He rejected Corbyn’s proposal and promised not to raise taxes on working families. He also pledged to support Britain’s military, hoping to shake off an anti-patriotic stigma attached to Labor during the Corbyn era.
Mr. Mr. Corbyn also condemned the anti-Semitism that contaminated the party’s ranks. Starmer insisted. Although he did not draw a connection between it and his personal life, his wife Victoria Starmer came from a Jewish family in London.
