LONDON — He was a lefty lawyer who defended vegan anarchists before prosecuting terrorists on behalf of the British crown. He was an editor of a Trotsky magazine in his youth, yet he delighted capitalists by putting “wealth creation” at the heart of thethis year. He was an anti-monarchist who was then knighted as “Sir Keir” and now will meet with the king once a week.
But what is Starmer’s mandate, really, other than his self-evident campaign slogan of “Change”? In Ipsos polling last month, half of respondents said they On the campaign trail, Starmer introduced himself by saying, “My mum was a nurse, my dad was a toolmaker.” He talked about growing up with unpaid bills and the phone being cut off. Pasta “was a foreign food” in his home, his biographer Baldwin wrote. The family did not travel abroad.
London media lawyer Mark Stephens, who worked on cases with Starmer, said he was “always looking 10 miles down the road,” at how a seemingly unwinnable case could be won on appeal to the Supreme Court or the European Court of Human Rights. But after that election, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was out, and Starmer was in. He set out to remake the Labour Party.Critics who were bested by Starmer in intraparty brawls call him an opportunist. His allies credit him with purging members who had contributed to the public sense that Labour had ““What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party,” billionaire businessman John Caudwell, previously a big Tory donor, told the BBC.