Keir Rodney Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, ending fourteen years of Conservative government with Labour becoming the largest party in the House of Commons.
Starmer was born on 2 September 1962 in Southwark, London but grew up in the town of Oxted in Surrey.
He was the second of the four children of Josephine (née Baker), a nurse, and Rodney Starmer, a toolmaker.
His parents were Labour Party supporters, and reportedly named him after the party’s first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardie, though Starmer said in 2015 that he did not know whether this is true
He passed the 11-plus examination and gained entry to Reigate Grammar School, then a voluntary aided selective grammar school.
The school was converted into an independent fee-paying school in 1976, while he was a student. The terms of the conversion were such that his parents were not required to pay for his schooling until he turned 16, and when he reached that point, the school, now a charity, awarded him a bursary that allowed him to complete his education there without any parental contribution.
The subjects that he chose for specialist study in his last two years at school were mathematics, music and physics, in which he achieved A level grades of B, B and C.
Among his classmates were the musician Norman Cook, alongside whom Starmer took violin lessons; Andrew Cooper, who went on to become a Conservative peer; and the future conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan. According to Starmer, he and Sullivan “fought over everything … Politics, religion. You name it”.
In his teenage years, Starmer was active in Labour politics; he was a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists at the age of 16.
He was a junior exhibitioner at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama until the age of 18, and played the flute, piano, recorder, and violin.
In the early 1980s, Starmer was caught by police illegally selling ice creams while trying to raise money during a holiday to the French Riviera. He escaped the incident without punishment, beyond the ice creams being confiscated.
Starmer studied law at the University of Leeds, becoming a member of the university’s Labour Club and graduating with first class honours and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree in 1985, becoming the first member of his family to graduate.
He undertook postgraduate studies at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating from the University of Oxford as a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) in 1986.
From 1986 to 1987, Starmer served as the editor of Socialist Alternatives, a Trotskyist radical magazine. The magazine was produced by an organisation under the same name, which represented the British section of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency (IRMT).
In July 2024, Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, ending fourteen years of Conservative government with Labour becoming the largest party in the House of Commons.
In his victory speech, Starmer thanked party workers for their hard work – including nearly five years of revamping and rebranding Labour in the face of Tory dominance – and urged them to savour the moment, but warned them of challenges ahead and pledged his government would work for “national renewal”:
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