‘Our love will get stronger day-after-day’. Starmer on his romance with spouse

If one thing we are certain: Sir Keir Starmer, 61, Labour Party leader and potentially our next Prime Minister, loves football. He says so, often and unequivocally. He is almost lyrical about it.

It is not just the game but that sense of collective purpose – the communal rituals marking triumph and disaster – that comes when you watch footie live with 60,000 others in a stadium, which entrances him and releases him from the constraints of Westminster.

When he describes the experience of being an Arsenal supporter – of sitting in the West Stand at the Emirates Stadium (he’s been a season ticket holder there and at previous ground Highbury since 1993) – he throws off the shackles that make him stiff and formal in Parliament and visibly relaxes.

‘The singing, the chanting, the banter; that unknown choreography in the way a crowd rises up; to have all these people coming together for this brilliant, shared experience; when there is a moment in football, when there is a goal, it’s fantastic.

‘In the stands you are not in a shirt and tie. You’re there with your friends. We’ve all been sitting in the same seats for years and years, surrounded by people who you know by their first name but not their second; you know them really well, but you don’t know their families…

‘And today we’re up in the stands for the last game of the season, which will be brilliant. Football is my thing. I love it; play it, watch it. I go to Arsenal with my son and Colin Peacock, one of my very closest friends since school, and his son, and with a group of other friends. We go to the pub and have a bit of banter and I walk down to the stadium with my boy and these close friends.

‘I know this is going to sound very simple, nothing much to anyone else, but for me, to be walking down, side by side with Colin, our two sons in front of us, it’s just an incredibly powerful moment.’

Starmer is talking to me on the morning of this crucial last Premier League home game of the season. At lunchtime, before afternoon kick-off, I go to the pub – in a quiet street off the bustling Holloway Road just outside his Holborn and St Pancras constituency – where he and his mates have gathered for their regular pre-match drink and chat, to experience the ritual of the stadium walk with him.

His son, almost 16, now taller than him and rangier, sits opposite with a teenage friend immersed in chat of their own. Starmer is sipping a pint of Camden Hells lager, laughing, predicting the day’s score. The pub – relaxed, Victorian, pared back to stripped wooden floors, with long refectory tables – is a bustling, unpretentious neighbourhood meeting place. Sunday roasts cost around £20.

Arsenal, strong all season, have come within a hair’s breadth of winning the title, but we know in our hearts they will not lift the trophy (and they don’t). And now PM Rishi Sunak has called an election on 4 July, it is tempting to draw analogies with football.

Will Starmer’s Labour Party – currently ahead of the Conservatives in the polls by around 20 points – secure victory? Or are they, like Arsenal – in front for so much of the season – doomed to fail at the last? 

I ask: are you a winner? 

‘Yes!’ he cries. ‘We have to have a clear strategy for success. We have set out to change the Labour Party and we’re now humbly asking the voters to put their trust in us to change the country.’

What does this change constitute? Is Starmer a socialist? ‘Yes,’ he says emphatically, adding, ‘If you read the back of our membership card, we are a democratic socialist party. I have spelt out what that means for the first time. I have added country first, party second.’

When asked to define Starmerism, political commentators have been flummoxed. He has come in for incessant lampooning for trying to be all things to all people.

As we set off for the stadium, walking briskly in dappled sunshine through streets lined with high Victorian houses, I try to find out: who is the real Keir Starmer, the man behind the opaque politician?

One mate occasionally throws an arm round his shoulders. Another tells me: ‘I adore him. He’d make a great Prime Minister. The best since…’ 

Words fail him. 

‘Clem Attlee?’ I supply the name of Labour’s great reforming leader who was also Winston Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition. 

‘Even better,’ he says, adding darkly, ‘Attlee was a mason.’

The group, Starmer in their midst, smiling and glad-handing passersby, elicit occasional remarks and glances. ‘Is this a political rally?’ calls a man in an Arsenal shirt from the crowd, which is gathering in numbers like a swarm of bees approaching a giant hive, the closer we get to the Emirates. ‘Red Army!’ shouts another.

Four or five people ask for selfies.

Starmer stops, smilingly obliges. ‘You’re a great man. I’m very honoured,’ says one. Another tells him, ‘Good luck to you. I hope you win.’ 

Then I hear the man mutter about a friend of his: ‘Lenny’s a proper red. He will be disgusted with me.’

Starmer has been bringing his son to Arsenal since he was about seven, an age when he and his wife Victoria, Lady Starmer (he always calls her Vic) were concerned about their youngster hearing the crowd’s more sweary chants.

‘At the time we had a massive German player, with a beard, Per Mertesacker, and the crowd used to chant: “We’ve got a big f*****g German.” Swearing was a no-go area for our kids at their age so I said to all my friends in the stand, “Can you lean in and sing, ‘We’ve got a big fuzzy German’ when the chant starts?” which they duly did with great grins on their faces.’

Did it cut any ice with your son? ‘For a while. Then they used to chant “F*** off, Mourinho” and no amount of fuzz could disguise that.’ He laughs. (Jose Mourinho managed several Premiership clubs and was deeply unpopular with the Arsenal fans.)

‘I took our daughter, too – she’s 13, going on 16 – and there was the famous chant about the ref she enjoyed [‘The referee’s a w****r’]. One Friday night – it was quite a lively crowd – a couple of fans took their shirts off and started running up and down the steps, which she found hilarious.’

It’s clear he relishes the companionability, the proximity to the action; the grit and hullabaloo of the crowd. But it might be his last match in the stands. If he is elevated to PM, surely his security team will insist he’s whisked off to the executive lounge?

‘If I can manage to stay in the stands I’d like that to continue,’ he says. ‘I’ve been through a lot with those guys. It could be up for negotiation,’ he says doubtfully, ‘but yes, I think they’ll want to move me.’

Starmer is a reserved man, fiercely protective of his family’s privacy, and has never publicly named his children, but today he talks effusively about his wife.

Married for 17 years, their first encounter was not propitious. His biographer Tom Baldwin recounts how Vic, then a solicitor, while Starmer was a senior barrister, was irritated by his obsessive checking of facts when he called to discuss some documents for a court case. She insisted they were all in order. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked again. Exasperated, she turned to colleagues after putting the phone down and asked: ‘Who the f*** does he think he is?’

She found out a few weeks later when they were placed next to each other at a legal dinner and Vic shared her vegetarian meal with him (he eats fish but had been given meat). Their first date was at a pub in Camden, since denounced by their son as the least romantic location he could imagine.

Now Starmer insists he is romantic. He cites their honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast as ‘the most romantic getaway’ and recounts (more prosaically) how he lost his wedding ring and had to rummage through a whole bin of paper hand towels to retrieve it.

Landmark days are still remembered: ‘We went out on Valentine’s Day [to see the Bob Marley film One Love] and we always mark our wedding anniversary. This year we had a meal out and our security team put Sade on in the car and a box of chocolates on the seat.’

What does love mean to you? I ask.

‘Vic,’ he says simply. ‘Love and Vic are two sides of the same coin. It sounds naff, but we’re made for each other. If anything, our love gets stronger every day. She’s gorgeous, sassy, grounded. She makes me complete, who I really am.’

When I press him to expand on that – we’re all keen to know who he really is – he flounders a little, but I sense that her no-nonsense feistiness is the counterbalance to his lawyerly precision. Does she take the mickey, too? ‘Yes, you should hear her in private,’ he smiles.

‘She sees things for what they are. She gets people very quickly. And we laugh a lot. Usually about all sorts of daft things the kids say.’

I ask how he will be marking Father’s Day. ‘This year is slightly different to other years for obvious reasons, but I’ll do my best to spend some quality time with our girl and our boy. That quality time is even more sacred on the campaign trail. Saying that, it’s England’s first Euros game, so I’ll be angling to watch that with the family.’

If he wins the election he says his biggest concern will be ‘the impact on the kids. Vic and I will do whatever we can to protect them.’

His children have the capacity to move him to tears, but such is his compulsion to preserve their privacy he will not tell me how; only that: ‘I’m emotional with them.’

‘My daughter tootles off on the bus with her mates to go shopping. Westfield, Brent Cross – which is also Vic’s favourite – and it’s great. And, yes, I do worry that my little girl is growing up too fast but I think you do when you live in London.

‘And they’re teenagers. They will go and do something they shouldn’t, as most teens do, but they have to live their lives. They walk to their school. If I got to Number 10 we’d try to continue with that.’

A few months ago, his daughter made it clear she was staying put at the family home if her dad won the election.

‘She asked, “If you win, are you going to move to Downing Street?” I said, “We’re not getting ahead of ourselves” and she said, completely deadpan, “Just to let you know, if you do win, I’m not coming.”’ He laughs. ‘She said she’s staying put because she has her friends nearby.’

But he assures me the family will never be fragmented. ‘We’ll be together whatever we do.’

At home, he insists, he shrugs off his work persona and is just Dad. Of course, his kids burst any semblance of ego, as any teenagers would.  ‘They ground me and rib me. My little girl said, “What time are you home?” and I told her I was going to be late, that I was going to a fundraising dinner. 

She asked, “What’s that?” and I said a dinner where they pay someone to speak. ‘She asked, “Who’s speaking?” I said, “Well, I am,” and she came back with “Why would anyone pay money to hear you speak?” I was reduced to quarter of an inch tall.’

His son was similarly unimpressed when Starmer came home one evening in 2022 clutching The Spectator’s Politician of the Year award. ‘He was sitting on the settee, he didn’t look at me or look up from the telly. He just said, “How did you blag that, then?”’

At home Starmer relaxes by cooking at the weekend, usually on Saturday evening: ‘I put on Craig Charles’s Funk and Soul Show on BBC Radio 6 Music and the more elaborate I get with the recipe the less likely the kids are to eat it, so I always put a pan of pasta sauce on the side.’

In the morning, before joining him for football, I’d been in the TV studio to watch him prepare his signature dish – tandoori salmon – live on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. I joke that if he lost his seat he might become a TV cook: he seems to have mastered the knack of prepping food and talking to camera at the same time.

‘I don’t know about that,’ he smiles. ‘I like to be on my own in the kitchen while I’m cooking. Vic would say I use every pot in there. I think I’m quite disciplined. I do clear up as I go but Vic will help afterwards, too.

‘She’s vegetarian and the kids were until they were ten. Then we said, “You can do what you like.” Our little girl carried on and our boy has taken full advantage of the licence and eats every kind of meat there is. So I have to have a few variants of each dish on the go. The older the kids get, the better they are at trying new stuff.’

While his sport is football, Vic’s is horseracing: ‘She loves flat racing [not jumps because she thinks that’s cruel]. Her mum was born and brought up in Doncaster and her nan lived on the edge of the racecourse. So Vic’s mum had horseracing in her blood and Vic loves it, too.’

He tells me a cautionary tale of how they took the kids to the St Leger in Doncaster. ‘They asked, “Can we have a bet?” and we tried to design it so they’d be gambling on a horse that wouldn’t win, so they’d learn that betting doesn’t pay. But of course their horse came in first and they made a modest fortune. Completely the opposite lesson to the one intended,’ he laughs.

Starmer is as well-groomed as his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, was ramshackle.

His head of silver-grey hair is impeccably styled (he is a regular at the Blue Steel Barbers in North London) and his clothes are understated. Navy T-shirts and jeans predominate on casual days; his windcheater looks expensive. He bears himself with quiet confidence – average height and build – and specs give him a scholarly air. His voice, less nasal and cramped than it was, is becoming expansive, sometimes almost oratorial in public.

He comes across as a good father and husband; resolutely ordinary; uncomfortable with grand gestures and almost obsessively reticent about parading his family for his own political advantage – but his mind is precise, forensic.

He came to politics relatively late in life via a legal career as a human rights barrister and then the country’s chief prosecutor. After his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions he was awarded a knighthood. Although the most working-class leader of the Labour Party for a generation, he is also the first to have had the prefix Sir attached to his name before he got the job. This leads many to assume – wrongly – an elevated status.

Actually, his roots are modest. His dad Rod (‘a difficult sod’, Starmer has said) was a toolmaker. His mum Jo, a nurse, was loving and uncomplaining despite having a severe form of Still’s disease, a rare type of rheumatoid arthritis, from the age of 11.

His parents were the forces that shaped him, he says. ‘Mum and Dad brought different things. My mum had incredible courage  and determination. She was told that she would be in a wheelchair and never have children [in fact, she had four: Anna, then Keir, born in September 1962, followed by twins Katy and Nick] – and she fought and fought. That determination, that resilience, that incredible intent to win, to overcome the odds, is something she taught me.

‘Dad felt looked down upon because he worked in a factory. He felt disrespected. That has stayed with me, and it really matters personally to me to treat everyone with respect and dignity.’

They shared their cramped and chaotic pebbledash semi in Oxted, Surrey, with four dogs; gifts to the Starmer children from their parents on their tenth birthdays.

Starmer remembers the mayhem of the family holiday – always to the Lake District – ‘with all four dogs and kids packed into Dad’s Cortina saloon’. His own children have ‘launched a campaign’ – so far unsuccessfully – to get a dog. ‘But we have a cat called Jo-Jo who spends most of his time trying to kid one or other of us that he hasn’t been fed before he goes over the fence for second helpings.’

Theirs is a tight-knit family. Starmer’s Jewish father-in-law, now aged 95, visits every weekend. ‘We’re very determined the kids understand what being Jewish means. Sometimes we do Friday-night supper and go to the synagogue now and again.’

On our final meeting Starmer is out on the stump, talking to NHS workers in Worcester. He tells them his mum was a nurse; one of his sisters – now a care worker – was also a nurse. Vic’s late mum was a community GP and Vic now works in occupational health at a hospital near their North London home: ‘So the NHS runs through our DNA,’ he says.

He is energised by the campaign but misses his family: ‘I can’t tell you how much we want to get out there but I hate being away from Vic and the kids. She hates it, too. Our son is doing his GCSEs so I talk to him about how he’s getting on.’

And their daughter? ‘She likes to know what I’ve had for breakfast. Yesterday I sent her a photo of a plate of melon.’

In these unassuming domestic details lies the kernel of the man who could be our next Prime Minister: politics is his lifeblood but home is where his heart is.

Keir’s cultural picks

Box sets I’d love to have time for those…

Podcast Where would I even start with the thousands there are these days!

Restaurant Mister Singh’s India in Glasgow – home of the fabled tandoori salmon.

Music Beethoven, Piano Concerto No 5, 2nd Movement (when piano comes in) – it’s the music Vic walked in to at our wedding. It reminds me of that special day.

Football player That’s a tough one, there are so many. But I’d have to say Thierry Henry.

Breakfast I’ve had the mickey taken out of me for my breakfast choices before…

Walk Climbing up the Langdale Pikes in the Lake District – that part of the world was my mum’s favourite so it always makes me think of her.

The Starmer paternal family tree

 

Researched on ancestry.co.uk