Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, campaigns ahead of the general election, in Redditch, UK, on Wednesday, July 3, 2024.
Earnest, intense, practical and not brimming with charisma, he finds himself on the cusp of a potential landslide victory without the star quality that marked previous British leaders on the doorstep of power, whether Margaret Thatcher, the 1980s free-market champion, or Tony Blair, the avatar of “Cool Britannia”.
The polls that predict his party will win a lopsided majority in Parliament on July 4 also suggest that he is unloved by British voters. They struggle to warm to a man who seems less at ease in the political arena than in the courtroom where he excelled. Raised in a working-class family in Surrey, outside London, Mr Starmer did not have an easy childhood. His relationship with his father, a toolmaker, was distant. His mother, a nurse, suffered a debilitating illness that took her in and out of the hospital. He became the first university graduate in his family, studying first at Leeds University, and then law at Oxford.
When Conservatives questioned whether Mr Starmer, too, had violated lockdown rules by having a beer and an Indian takeout dinner with colleagues in April 2021, he vowed to step down if police found he had been in the wrong. He was cleared – an episode that allies said showcased his rigorous adherence to the rules and offered a stark contrast to the leaders of the Conservative Party.
Allies of Mr Starmer say he is aware of his limits and works hard to address his weaknesses. While he is not a natural orator, his speeches have improved since his early days in Parliament, when one critic likened his performance to “watching the audience at a literary festival listen to a reading of T.S. Eliot.”“How does Keir Starmer energise a room?” Ms Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, asked recently before delivering her punchline: “He leaves it.