Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer became British prime minister in July 2024 after leading Labour to its largest majority since 1997. Born in London in 1962 and raised in Surrey, he was the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who had Still's disease and was seriously ill for most of his life. He was named after Keir Hardie, Labour's first leader. He was the first in his family to attend university, reading law at Leeds and taking a postgraduate degree at Oxford. He practised as a barrister specialising in human rights, defending death row prisoners in the Caribbean without fee and acting for the two defendants in the McLibel case against McDonald's, which became the longest trial in English legal history. He became Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008, running the Crown Prosecution Service for five years — including the prosecutions after the 2011 riots and the parliamentary expenses scandal — and was knighted for it. He entered parliament in 2015 for Holborn and St Pancras, served as Brexit spokesman under Jeremy Corbyn, and pushed the party towards supporting a second referendum, which is widely held to have contributed to its 2019 defeat. He won the leadership in 2020 and spent four years moving the party to the centre, expelling Corbyn from the parliamentary party over his response to a report on antisemitism, and dropping most of the policy platform he had been elected on. The 2024 election gave Labour 411 seats on about thirty-four per cent of the vote. His government has faced a difficult fiscal inheritance and early falls in approval.
- Lived: 1962 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2024-present)
