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Keir Starmer  (born September 2, 1962) is a British politician and lawyer who has been the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2024 and the Labour Party’s Leader since 2020.

Starmer announced his resignation from both positions on June 22, 2026, and will remain in office until the Labour Party’s leadership election is completed.

Starmer served as Opposition Leader from 2020 to 2024 before becoming Prime Minister. He has been a Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015, having previously served as the Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.

Keir Starmer Biography

Keir Rodney Starmer was born on September 2, 1962, in Southwark, South East London, and grew up in Oxted, Surrey. He is the second of four children of Josephine, a nurse, and Rodney Starmer, a toolmaker. His mother developed Still’s Disease.

His parents were both Labour Party members, and he was reportedly named after the party’s first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardie, though Starmer declined to confirm this when asked in 2015.

He was named Keir after the Labour Party’s first parliamentary leader, J. Keir Hardie. Starmer grew up in Surrey, where he attended Reigate Grammar School, an elite state school that later became private.

He was the first member of his family to graduate from university, earning a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Leeds in 1985.

He then went on to get a postgraduate bachelor’s degree in civil law from St. Edmund Hall in Oxford. Between 1986 and 1987, Starmer belonged to the editorial collective of the left-wing magazine Socialist Alternatives.

Career

Starmer began his barrister practice in 1987 at the Middle Temple, one of London’s Inns of Court. Three years later, he co-founded the Doughty Street Chambers legal business, where he served as joint head for several years beginning in 2002.

That year, he was named Queen’s (now King’s) Counsel (a senior lawyer chosen to advise the crown). Starmer primarily practiced criminal defense law, with a particular emphasis on human rights problems in the United Kingdom and abroad.

He represented criminals sentenced to death in many Caribbean countries and served on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s death penalty advisory council between 2002 and 2008.

In addition, he worked as a human rights adviser for the Northern Ireland Policing Board (2003-08) and the Association of Chief Police Officers. He would later describe his time in these positions as having a significant impact on his choice to run for Parliament.

In 2008, Starmer became the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), a position he held until 2013. Among the most notable cases during Starmer’s stint as DPP was the sexual abuse scandal involving media celebrity Jimmy Savile, which the CPS controversially chose not to prosecute.

In 2022, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson would make a presumably politically driven (and unsupported) charge that Starmer was responsible for the decision not to prosecute Savile.

At least in part as a result of the incident (and the misguided belief that false rape charges are frequent), Starmer instituted modifications in the handling of sexual abuse allegations to prevent practices that could “lead to injustice” for rape victims.

While serving as DPP, Starmer oversaw the prosecution of Chris Huhne, secretary of state for energy and climate change, who was forced to resign from the Conservative-Liberal coalition government’s cabinet due to criminal proceedings stemming from a speeding incident.

During the 2011 riots in London and other British towns, Starmer advocated for speedy prosecutions rather than lengthy prison sentences. In recognition of his contributions to law and criminal justice, he was named Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 2014.

Political Career

In December 2014, many months after MP Frank Dobson announced his retirement, Starmer was chosen as the Labour Party candidate for Dobson’s seat in the London constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras.

He was elected to that position in the House of Commons on May 7, 2015. Although it was anticipated that Starmer might run to replace Ed Miliband as Labour Party leader in 2015, he declined, citing inexperience.

Instead, Miliband’s successor, Jeremy Corbyn, chose Starmer as shadow Home Office minister. However, in June 2016, Starmer resigned alongside a number of other shadow ministers after losing faith in Corbyn’s leadership in the face of Brexit-related developments.

Nevertheless, Corbyn, who was reelected as leader later that year, appointed Starmer as shadow Brexit secretary.

Following the 2019 general election, in which the Labour Party suffered its worst defeat since 1935, Corbyn resigned as leader. Starmer declared his candidacy for the seat in January 2020 and won the election on April 4.

Though Starmer ran his candidacy on a socialist platform, the Labour Party has moved away from Corbyn’s left-wing ideas and toward the political center under his leadership. Starmer has been accused by certain members of the party of fomenting factionalism and marginalizing or expelling people on the left.

Notably, Starmer introduced a motion that caused Labour’s National Executive Committee to refuse to endorse Corbyn as a Labour candidate for the House of Commons in the next general election, citing Corbyn’s alleged failure to adequately address revelations of antisemitism within the party during his tenure as leader.

In February 2023, Starmer detailed five “national missions”—long-term goals for the economy, crime, the National Health Service (NHS), education, and the climate crisis—that he recommended as the foundation for the next Labour manifesto.

In May 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for a general election in July of that year, more than six months before the legally allowed period. Starmer’s Labour Party had been polling well, but on July 4, 2024, voters delivered a historic landslide victory.

The Conservatives lost more than 250 seats, with the vast majority of them going to Labour.

While Starmer welcomed his victory with the slogan “change begins now,” an examination of underlying voting trends showed elements that led some in the media to label the results as a “loveless landslide.”

The turnout for the election was 59.9 percent, the second lowest since Britain’s introduction of universal suffrage in 1928. Perhaps more worrying for Labour was the party’s overall proportion of the vote.

Although Labour won 412 seats in Parliament—a commanding 63 percent majority—its vote share was only 33.7 percent. This marked a mere 1.6 percent increase from the 2019 general election, which was a resounding Conservative triumph.

Starmer’s honeymoon period was limited, and his centrist economic policies drew criticism not from the opposition Conservatives, but from within his own party. When Starmer suggested reducing disability benefits as part of a welfare reform package in May 2025, dozens of Labour MPs signed an open letter vowing to vote against it.

Weeks of fighting would follow as Starmer sought to quell a revolt that had grown to encompass almost 120 Labour backbenchers. A drastically reduced version of the measure was enacted in July, but 49 Labour MPs voted against it, and Starmer’s position within his own party appeared rattled.

Starmer reshuffled his cabinet in September 2025 after Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner resigned in a controversy involving underpayment of taxes on a second property. David Lammy was appointed lord chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister; Yvette Cooper moved from Home Secretary to Foreign Secretary; and Shabana Mahmood was promoted from lord chancellor to Home Secretary.

Starmer’s administration includes several senior Labour lawmakers from the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown eras. Among these was Peter Mandelson, Brown’s former business secretary, who was appointed ambassador to the United States in December 2024.

The appointment originally raised suspicions because Mandelson had previously described the US President. Donald Trump was described as “a bully” who was “reckless and dangerous to the world.” Mandelson denied these claims, but he was soon entangled in an even larger dispute.

In September 2025, the United States Congress published a tranche of documents from the “Epstein files,” a compilation of information obtained during two criminal investigations against American businessman and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson referred to Epstein in one document as his “best pal,” and he was fired within days of the revelation.

A second batch of “Epstein files” was revealed in January 2026, and they were even more devastating to Mandelson than the first. Emails suggested that Mandelson had used his position as business secretary to benefit Epstein personally.

Other emails appeared to show Mandelson receiving payments from Epstein totaling $75,000. Scotland Yard initiated an inquiry into Mandelson on grounds of “misconduct in public office offences,” and he was arrested in February.

At the time of the Mandelson-Epstein discoveries, Starmer already had a 75% unfavorability rating, and the removal of the senior official in charge of the Mandelson vetting procedure did little to calm the storm.

Although Starmer was quizzed in Parliament over the Mandelson appointment and his comments about it, MPs voted against opening a formal investigation.

On May 7, 2026, local council seats in England were contested, as were parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales. The event was widely interpreted as a referendum on Starmer’s performance as Prime Minister.

While Labour did poorly across the board, losing more than 1,300 local council seats, the elections also highlighted the ongoing fragmentation of the British political scene. Newer parties, such as Reform UK and the Greens, have significantly increased their representation at the expense of Labour and the Conservatives.

Nationalist parties also did well; Plaid Cymru broke Labour’s century-long control in Wales, while the Scottish National Party became the largest party in the Scottish parliament.

A small group of Labour MPs began demanding Starmer’s resignation almost as soon as the results were announced, but he swore that he was “not going to walk away” from the prime ministership and “plunge the country into chaos.”

On 22 June 2026, Starmer announced his resignation as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party, and urged the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee to set a timetable for selecting his successor, with nominations opening on July 9 and the process ending before the summer holiday. Starmer will remain in his responsibilities until the leadership election is concluded.

Personal Life

Like Starmer, his wife, Victoria Starmer, whom he married in 2007, is an educated legal expert. She currently works in occupational health for the NHS. The pair has a son and a daughter and resides in North London.

Starmer has a lifetime interest in football (soccer), has played at amateur levels, and has been a loyal Arsenal fan since boyhood. As a child, he had violin lessons from Norman Cook (later a member of the pop group the Housemartins and now better known as Fatboy Slim) and became acquainted with Andrew Sullivan, a British-born American conservative political commentator.

Keir Starmer Net Worth

Keir Starmer’s net worth is expected to be between £7 million and £10 million by 2026. This fortune stems mostly from his successful legal career, parliamentary wages, and pension benefits, rather than high-profile commercial enterprises or speculative investments.