They put an end to 14 years of Conservative power. Labour won the UK general election on Thursday 4th July. With 410 seats and a clear majority according to the results of this Friday morning taking into account 639 of the 650 constituencies, the centre-left party is making a strong comeback in the political landscape across the Channel.
Led by Keir Starmer, 61, who was recently appointed prime minister by King Charles III, Labour has benefited greatly from voters’ thirst for change, more than reversing its crushing defeat five years ago. Before the election, the former human rights lawyer, elected to the British Parliament since 2015, said that being leader of the opposition was “the most frustrating job I’ve ever done” and that he was eager to govern. Since taking over as leader of Labour in 2020, after the electoral rout of 2019, he has not wavered one iota from his strategy for winning power.
“Election victories don’t fall from the sky. They are won the hard way, by fighting very hard, and this one could only be won by a transformed Labour,” he insisted. “Change starts now,” Keir Starmer also promised, while Labour’s victory owes much to the rejection aroused by the Conservatives after a succession of crises and a disastrous election campaign. Keir Starmer has striven since his arrival at the head of Labour to reshape the party, refocusing it on the economy and pushing aside the left wing, the only way according to him to return to power. Today, Keir Starmer “is on the way to becoming the most powerful British Prime Minister since Tony Blair”, facing Conservatives “annihilated in the bloodbath of the elections”, notes the european edition of Politico.
A leader described as “boring”
The new Prime Minister, former Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales, will not have an easy time, warns The Guardian, as spotted International mail. Certainly, the Labour leader has demonstrated that he has “iron discipline, fierce determination and political skills”. But “unlike the last Labour leader to win the election, Tony Blair, Keir Starmer will inherit a fragile economy, strained public finances, a climate emergency and crumbling public services”, notes the British daily.
Keir Starmer’s massive victory crowns the work of an austere and often uncharismatic leader. The future Prime Minister is described by The New York Times as a “serious, intense, pragmatic and uncharismatic” leader. “He is a man who seems less comfortable in the political arena than in the courtroom where he excelled,” the American daily believes. According to the latter, Keir Starmer does not have “the star quality that marked previous British leaders at the gates of power, whether Margaret Thatcher, the champion of the free market of the 1980s, or Tony Blair, the avatar of ‘Cool Britannia'”. His precise tone of lawyer fuels his somewhat austere and uncharismatic image. A feeling accentuated during the legislative campaign, where he was more cautious than enthusiastic.
“He has been fiercely – some would say boringly – disciplined. He’s not going to set hearts racing, but he looks relatively prime ministerial,” he told The Daily Beast. New York Times Jill Rutter, a former senior civil servant and researcher at the London-based research group UK in a Changing Europe. While not a natural speaker, his speeches have improved since he first entered parliament. Yet the reputation for boredom persists. “How does Keir Starmer energise a room?” Gillian Keegan, the education secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, recently asked, before replying: “He leaves.”
A fervent Arsenal supporter
These criticisms irritate Keir Starmer. “He doesn’t like being called boring,” he told New York Times Tom Baldwin, a former Labour Party adviser who has published a biography of the new British prime minister. “Nobody likes to be called boring; they really don’t like it,” he adds. According to Tom Baldwin, Conservative leaders have “belatedly realised” that being “boring” is a “quality that gives Keir Starmer a decidedly reassuring air after the political and economic chaos of recent years,” he says this time in The Guardian.
Keir Starmer’s friends describe him as a man with a sense of humour. Despite knee surgery, Keir Starmer, who grew up on the outskirts of London with a brother and two sisters, a distant father and a mother with a rare joint disease that disabled her for years, still plays football regularly and competitively, says The New York Times. He is a keen supporter of Arsenal, the football club that plays not far from his home in north London. The GuardianTom Baldwin quotes Mark Adams, who has known him since school: “Keir is a normal guy who has always enjoyed having a pint or two, talking nonsense with his mates and playing a lot more football than is good for him. It’s how he reconnects with his private network and recharges his batteries.”
For his biographer Tim Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s arrival in Downing Street “does not mean that he will have changed the lives of others very much. But if Keir Starmer wants to stay in Down Street long enough, he should try to avoid changing his own life too much.”