Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria Starmer in London, Britain, July 5 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Britain’s main opposition Labour party looks set for a landslide election win, exit polls indicated, with Keir Starmer replacing Rishi Sunak as prime minister, ending 14 years of Conservative rule.

Also Read: U.K. General Election 2024 updates

The survey for U.K. broadcasters suggested centre-left Labour would win 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, putting it back in power for the first time since 2010, with a 170-seat majority.

Mr. Sunak’s Tories would only get 131 – a record low – with the right-wing vote apparently spliced by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, which could bag 13 seats.

In another boost for the centrists, the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats would get 61 seats, ousting the Scottish National Party on 10 as the third biggest party.

London:

UK Labour leader Keir Starmer is an ex-human rights lawyer and public prosecutor who will have to focus his relentless work ethic and methodical mind to fixing the country.

If exit polls are confirmed, at 61, Starmer will be the oldest person to become British prime minister in almost half a century — and comes just nine years since he was first elected to parliament.

The married father-of-two is unlike most modern politicians: he had a long and distinguished career before becoming an MP and his views are rooted in pragmatism rather than ideology.

“We must return politics to service,” Starmer said repeatedly during the campaign, promising to put “country first, party second” following 14 chaotic years of Conservative rule under five different prime ministers.

That mantra chimes with supporters’ lauding of him as a managerial safe pair of hands who will approach life in Downing Street the same way he did his legal career: seriously and forensically.

Detractors, though, label him an uninspiring opportunist who regularly shifts position on an issue and who has failed to spell out a clear and defining vision for the country.

Football-mad Starmer, a devoted Arsenal fan, has struggled to shed his public image as buttoned-up and boring and only recently started to appear more at ease in the public spotlight.

Supporters admit that he fails to ooze the charisma of more flashy predecessors like Boris Johnson, but say that therein lies his appeal: a reassuring and strait-laced presence following the turbulent, self-serving years of Tory rule.

With his grey quiff and black-rimmed glasses — Starmer, named after Labour’s founding father Keir Hardie — is also the centre-left party’s most working-class leader in decades.

“My dad was a toolmaker, my mum was a nurse,” he tells voters often, countering depictions by opponents that he is the epitome of a smug, liberal, London elite.

Starmer’s purging of left-wingers from his party highlights a ruthless side that has propelled him to Britain’s highest political office, but he is said to be funny in private and loyal to his friends.

He has pledged to maintain his habit of not working after 6:00 pm on a Friday to spend time with his wife Victoria, who works as an occupational therapist in the National Health Service, and their two teenage children, who he does not name in public.

“There’s something extraordinary in him still being quite normal,” Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin wrote in the Guardian.

Top Lawyer

Born on September 2, 1962, Keir Rodney Starmer was raised in a cramped, pebble-dashed semi-detached house on the outskirts of London by a seriously ill mother and an emotionally distant father.

He had three siblings, one of whom had learning difficulties. His parents were animal lovers who rescued donkeys.

A talented musician, Starmer had violin lessons at school with Norman Cook, the former Housemartins bassist who became DJ Fatboy Slim.

After legal studies at the universities of Leeds and Oxford, Starmer turned his attention to leftist causes, defending trade unions, anti-McDonald’s activists, and death row inmates abroad.

He is friends with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney from their time together at the same legal practice and once recounted a boozy lunch he had with her and her Hollywood actor husband George.

In 2003, he began moving towards the establishment, shocking colleagues and friends, first with a job ensuring police in Northern Ireland complied with human rights legislation.

Five years later, he was appointed director of public prosecutions (DPP) for England and Wales when Labour’s Gordon Brown was prime minister.

Between 2008 and 2013, he oversaw the prosecution of MPs for abusing their expenses, journalists for phone-hacking, and young rioters involved in unrest across England.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, but rarely uses the prefix “Sir”, and in 2015 was elected as a member of parliament, representing a seat in left-leaning north London.

Just weeks before he was elected, his mother died of a rare disease of the joints that had left her unable to walk for many years.

Rebellion

Just a year after becoming an MP, Starmer joined a rebellion by Labour lawmakers over radical left-winger Jeremy Corbyn’s perceived lack of leadership during the EU referendum campaign.

It failed, and later that year he rejoined the top team as Labour’s Brexit spokesman, where he remained until succeeding Corbyn after he took the party to its worst defeat since 1935 in the last election five years ago.

Starmer moved the party back to the more electable centre ground, purging Corbyn and rooting out anti-Semitism.

Dominic Grieve, who as Conservative attorney-general worked closely with Starmer as DPP, said he “inspires loyalty because he comes across as being so transparently decent and rational”.

“These are quite important features even if you disagree with a policy. And he comes across as man of moderation,” he told The Times.

Nevertheless, the left accuses him of betrayal for dropping a number of pledges he made during his successful leadership campaign, including the scrapping of university tuition fees.

But his successful strategic repositioning of Labour is indicative of a constant throughout his life: a drive to succeed.

“If you’re born without privilege, you don’t have time for messing around,” Starmer once said.

“You don’t walk around problems without fixing them, and you don’t surrender to the instincts of organisations that won’t face up to change.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, right, with candidate Michael Shanks after Labour won the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, at South Lanarkshire Council Headquarters in Hamilton, on October 06, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

Britain’s main opposition Labour party on Friday welcomed a big local election win in Scotland as a sign its electoral fortunes were changing head of a UK general election.

Labour needs to win back some of the 40 seats it lost in Scotland in 2015 if it is to have a chance of ousting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government at a UK election likely to be held next year.

Polling expert John Curtice said the 20 percent swing to Labour — if replicated at a general election — could allow the party to recapture dozens of seats north of the border.

That could have “implications for the overall outcome in the general election because, if that were to happen, they would find it easier to get an overall majority”, Curtice added.

The result takes the Labour party’s tally of seats in Scotland from one to two, after it was all but wiped out by the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) at the 2015 election.

Labour leader Keir Starmer hailed the victory by nearly 59 percent of the vote as “seismic”, just days before the party gathers in the northwestern English city of Liverpool for its annual conference.

“This is a first step on a very, very important journey for all of us in Scotland, for all of us across the whole of the United Kingdom,” he said.

The by-election in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West seat, southeast of Glasgow, came after SNP lawmaker Margaret Ferrier was pushed out over a breach of Covid-19 regulations.

Labour candidate Michael Shanks won 17,845 votes, well ahead of the 8,399 polled by his SNP rival.

Shanks said the resounding result showed “Labour can kick the Tories out of Downing Street next year and deliver the change people want”.

The pro-independence SNP’s defeat follows a drop in popularity in Scotland following the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as party leader and Scotland’s first minister.

Sturgeon was the figurehead of the independence movement, overseeing a surge in support, particularly after Brexit, in which Scotland opposed leaving the European Union and during the Covid pandemic.

But in February, she unexpectedly announced her resignation and was later arrested with her husband over claims of mismanagement of SNP finances.

Starmer’s Labour has enjoyed double-digit poll leads for months as Sunak’s government has grappled with stubbornly high inflation and a cost-of-living crisis.

Recent surveys, however, have showed the gap narrowing, following a raft of populist policies announced by Sunak in recent weeks.

But Curtice said the Scottish result “firmly” confirmed “the direction of travel indicated by the polls”.

The Conservative Party also suffered a big defeat to Labour in July in the northern English constituency of Selby and Ainsty.

Curtice said taken together the wins were the “kind of results that you see in advance of general elections when parties are on course to win”, adding that it had been a “remarkably good night” for Labour.

Labour was once the dominant force in Scottish politics but has seen its influence decline at a national level since the end of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government in 2010.

In the devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, the SNP has long been the biggest party and currently governs in a coalition with the pro-independence Greens.