Keir Starmer’s spouse gave sweary 8-word response after terse first cellphone name

She’s the one person in his life Keir Starmer trusts implicitly, but little is known about the woman who should be almost guaranteed to be moving into the flat above 10 Downing Street in less than a month’s time.

Victoria Starmer, nee Alexander – Vic to her husband, Vicky to their friends – is mother to their two children, a 15-year-old boy and a daughter of 13, whose names have never been publicly released because of their parents’ desire to keep their lives as normal as possible.

While the occupational therapist, who is determined to continue working after July 4’s general election, is now Keir’s rock, their first encounter was anything but romantic. Vic, who is around 10 years younger than Keir’s 61 years, was then a solicitor who took a phone call from the senior barrister obsessively checking whether documents for a court case were accurate. “Yes, of course they are,” she told him – but Keir asked again, “Are you certain?” Exasperated, turning to her colleagues while putting the phone down, she exploded, “Who the f*** does he think he is?”

Happily, their first meet-up in person went a lot more smoothly. Keir and Victoria were seated next to each other at a legal dinner some weeks later, and she took pity on him when the committed vegetarian was served meat. Forking over some of her own meal, the pair quickly got chatting and arranged their first date at the Lord Stanley pub in Camden. While their son has denounced his dad’s wooing technique as the least romantic location he can imagine, Vic laughed: “At least he walked me to the bus stop afterward and waved at me when it left, so he got a tick for that.”

Starmer’s friends fell for Vic just as hard as he did, with one telling her that he made Keir complete. She, in the Labour leader’s own words, is “grounded, sassy, funny, street-wise – and utterly gorgeous too”, and when he spontaneously popped the question during a holiday in Santorini, she quickly brought him back to earth by telling him, “Won’t we need a ring, Keir?” The very next day, they chose a ring together, and married on May 6 2007 at the Fennes Estate in Essex surrounded by 200 of their closest friends and family – including Keir’s four best men. The bride gave her own emotional speech before her groom dedicated his to her – sweetly revealing later: “I wanted Vic to know how much I thought of her, what I could see in her, the love I got from her.”

A year after their honeymoon on the Amalfi coast in Italy, their son arrived. For a man whose livelihood was marked by competence, professionalism and accuracy, being handed a screaming baby was like landing in another world. Armed with a tiny outfit and nappies, Keir said: “My hands shook and my back was covered in sweat. There were a lot of buttons. Every time I moved one of his limbs, I thought I was going to break it or that social services would arrive and declare me an unfit parent.”

Marriage brought with it a whole new family, and Keir has since spoken lovingly of the relationship he had with Vic’s family, who are Jewish and originally from Poland – Vic has been to the village just outside of Kolo from which they fled before World War II. She is a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood, north London, and she and Keir still observe Friday night prayers. The death of Vic’s community doctor mum Barbara in 2020, while Keir was campaigning for the leadership battle, affected him deeply: she had tripped and fallen down some stairs and died days later after having a huge operation.

“This was a woman who had been in really good health, completely independent, who was really close to her grandchildren. She meant the world to all of us,” Keir told biographer Tom Baldwin. Watching his beloved wife losing her mum was “even harder” than the loss of his own parents, Jo and Rod. “I felt completely helpless because I couldn’t reach into the space to stop her hurting. There was nothing I could say to make this right. All I could do was show her how much she mattered to me.” In the wake of Barbara’s death, Keir turned his office in the family’s Kentish Town home into a bedroom for Vic’s 90-year-old father so they could look after him, close to where she lived as a girl.

While Vic has occasionally appeared next to Keir at Labour conference, and was pictured clapping for NHS workers on their doorstep during the pandemic, her natural instinct is to eschew the limelight. She has a background in Labour Party activism since studying law and sociology at Cardiff University, where she became president of the students’ union (like Neil Kinnock 30 years prior). She volunteered at Blair’s campaign HQ in 1997 and was involved in canvassing long before meeting Keir. When she qualified as a lawyer, Vic worked for a firm in Soho that specialised in street crime – she’d often spend the early hours meeting clients in police stations. But when she met Keir she’d moved over to less emotionally fraught fraud cases, then later changed career paths to take up her role in the NHS.

“She is determined to keep working, her job keeps her sane,” a pal told The Times. It’s unclear whether she’ll join Keir in the Downing Street flat should the opinion polls turn out to be accurate – her work is a few minutes’ walk from their home, and she’s told her husband: “If it happens, I won’t want to leave Kentish Town.” Their daughter has also put her foot down about leaving her friends and moving to the heart of Westminster. But, ever practical, Vic has also told friends: “We’ll do what we need to do.” If her husband wins the election, expect to see photographs of the couple on the front step of No10. “Victoria will stand by her man, the kids will use the back door,” said one.

Pals say the Starmers’ home life is much like any other busy family – Vic gets exasperated by Keir’s elaborate Saturday night cooking, which uses up every pan in the house, and they take turns to sort out the cat’s territorial skirmishes. While their son takes his gruelling GCSE exams, his mum has been keeping him fuelled with fried egg sandwiches.

Meanwhile, Cherie Blair – who was infamously caught in her nightie the morning after Labour’s 1997 election victory – has shared some advice with her successor-to-be: “Some people will dislike you not for anything you do but because of what you represent. The most important thing is to be true to yourself.”