Keir Starmer: Labour's shortest-serving prime minister

Author, Correspondents Department

Place of work, BBC Russian Service

Published 3 minutes ago

Reading time: 8 min

Two years ago, Keir Starmer, at the head of the Labor Party, celebrated its triumphant return to power after 14 years in opposition. Only two of his predecessors managed to lead Labor to victory with a three-digit parliamentary majority, but the result will make Starmer go down in party history as Labour's shortest-serving prime minister. His Conservative colleagues who led the government before him are familiar with this: Britain has had four prime ministers in five years.

Keir Starmer became a member of the House of Commons much later than most of his colleagues, at 52. By that time, he had almost a 30-year career as a lawyer, from barrister to director of the Crown Prosecution Service, that is, the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales.

At the same time, Starmer’s parents are from the working class, and he himself became the first person in his family to go to university. At home, everyone supported the Labor Party, and Keir received his name in honor of its founder and first leader, Scottish miner Keir Hardy.

In September 2022, Starmer told the BBC: “My father worked in a factory and my mother was a nurse, and I really know what it’s like to sit at the kitchen table and not be able to pay the bills. I remember our utilities and phone being cut off because we couldn't pay our bills, so I know what's going on in people's minds."

If in his youth Starmer, against the backdrop of a difficult childhood, adhered to extreme left-wing ideas - at the age of 16 he joined the youth branch of the Labor Party and for some time edited the radical left-wing magazine Socialist Alternatives - then he avoided radicalism in big politics.

Elected to Parliament as a Labor member in 2015, he often found himself in opposition to its then leader Jeremy Corbyn, including on the issue of Britain leaving the EU, which Starmer did not support. In 2016, he was among those fellow party members who tried to force Corbyn’s resignation, but the latter then remained in office, and Starmer became the shadow secretary for Brexit.

But when Labor suffered its worst general election defeat since 1935 in 2019, its leader resigned. Starmer was not among the favorites in the race to become the new leader. They joked that he was based on “Mr. Darcy,” Colin Firth’s character from the film “Bridget Jones’s Diary” - a neat and attractive lawyer, the embodiment of self-control, reserved to the point of almost completely lacking a sense of humor.

At the same time, Starmer managed to identify himself as a leader who would unite Labor, promising to preserve Corbyn’s “radicalism”. He led the party in 2020, promising to nationalize the water sector and abolish university tuition fees.