Keir Starmer appears to have just a few days left of his relatively normal life before his family are thrust into the spotlight when he takes up his position as the newly elected Prime Minister of the UK.
But less than 10 years ago the Labour leader could never have foreseen one day picking up the keys to Number 10 – as he didn’t even launch his political journey until 2015.
Instead, Keir enjoyed a high-flying career as a barrister, KC and landed one of the top legal jobs in the country when he was made Director of Public Prosecutions – the head honcho of the Crown Prosecution Service.
So what exactly did he do before arriving in parliament? Here’s a look back over his glittering career.
What was Keir Starmer’s job before Labour?
Keir passed the eleven-plus exam and was the only one of the four Starmer siblings to win a place at Reigate Grammar School. From there he got two Bs and a C at A-level and became the first person in his family to go to university.
Keir had wanted to study politics or something to do with theatre and music production, his biographer Tom Baldwin writes in his 2023 book about the Labour leader. But his parents Jo and Rodney convinced him to aim for a ‘proper’ profession, so he settled on a law degree at the University of Leeds.
On arrival at uni, the working class lad from Surrey felt out of place. “I was surrounded by a lot of people who had wanted to be lawyers all their lives, some of whose parents and grandparents had been lawyers too,” he recalled. “They talked knowledgeably about specialising in this or that field or arranging their summer internship at some or other barrister’s chambers.”
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It was in his third year that Keir found his passion for human rights and international law, and it was that which sparked his interest in politics. “The essence of being human, irrespective of who you are, where you come from and what your circumstances, is dignity,” he has said.
“It means all people have rights which cannot be taken away. This idea of irreducible human dignity became a sort of lode star which has guided me ever since; it gave me a method, a structure and a framework, by which I could test propositions. And it brought politics into the law for me.”
Keir graduated with a first in law and decided to follow his new-found passion. He was accepted onto the prestigious Bachelor of Civil Law course offered by Oxford University only to a very select few promising students, and spent a hectic year studying before graduating in 1986.
After taking his BCL, Keir moved to London and lived with friends in a “grotty” flat in Highgate, where the washing machine leaked so badly it rotted away the wooden floors and eventually fell into the room underneath. A decomposing pigeon was discovered in their water tank and the flatmates decided en masse to stop using one of the bathrooms after somebody was sick in the bathtub during a house party.
Pals tell of Keir’s intense concentration, to the point where they were once burgled and he was “so obsessed with his books… he didn’t notice two burglars walking round the house, helping themselves to our stuff”, one revealed.
But his career as a newly qualified barrister at the Middle Temple was taking off, and his passion for human rights took him to the campaign group Liberty, where he served as a legal officer until 1990. He then joined Doughty Street Chambers, during which time he assisted in several headline trials – including the McLibel case. His work started taking him around the world to defend criminals facing the death penalty – something that turned Keir’s stomach.
“The death penalty horrifies me – it’s a process involving dozens of people methodically planning to exterminate another human being in the name of the law,” he has previously said. “No matter how good your courts are and how terrifying or awful the crimes committed, there will always be miscarriages of justice. And in far too many countries where they still have capital punishment, there isn’t even much chance of a fair trial.”
Keir was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002 at the age of 39, and a few months later became joint head of his Chambers.
Time as Director of Public Prosecutions
In 2008, Keir reached a new career peak when he was made Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service – responsible for bringing criminal cases to court. One of his stand-out cases was putting behind bars two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers who had evaded justice for 15 years.
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While there Keir also oversaw the smashing of a grooming gang operating in Rochdale. A dozen Asian men were prosecuted for the sexual exploitation and rapes of young girls in the town, and Keir was instrumental in ensuring the trials went ahead after many of the girls had originally been dismissed as not credible witnesses because of their backgrounds.
“The police were saying, ‘They will get slaughtered if we put them up to give evidence in the witness box,'” Keir recalled. “The problem was we were looking for ‘the perfect victim’ and, almost always, that was not going to include the most vulnerable people most in need of protecting.”
Keir has wrongly faced criticism for failing to bring prolific paedophile Jimmy Savile to justice while in charge of the CPS, when in reality he had never been alerted to the complaints. When the BBC presenter died in 2010, suddenly scores of his victims came forward to tell their stories. “It was like a dam had burst and people rightly wanted to know why he had been able to get away with it for so long,” Keir said.
When he investigated, it appeared a handful of police complaints had been made against Savile while he was still alive, but no action had been taken because of insufficient evidence, and the victims didn’t support court action. “It never came close to crossing my desk and the local CPS lawyer who looked at the case did not even mention the decision to his immediate boss because, to him, it seemed routine,” said the Labour leader.
He asked his chief legal adviser Alison Levitt to conduct a probe, and it transpired police officers had warned victims that Savile had access to attack dog lawyers who would rinse them in court – and one victim was wrongly told her name would be in the newspapers. Keir published the Levitt report in 2013, his final year as DPP, along with an apology for the CPS’s “shortcomings” on the Savile case. In 2014 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for services to law and criminal justice.
When did Keir Starmer go into politics?
Keir first stood for election in 2015, winning the seat of Holborn and St Pancras after the former Labour MP Frank Dobson stood down. His motivation was seeing how then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s programme of austerity had affected the criminal justice system, and saw first-hand how ordinary people could no longer afford representation in court thanks to swingeing legal aid cuts.
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When Starmer was elected he won 29,062 votes – 52.9% of the share, and up from 25,198 won by Dobson for Labour in 2010. In the general election of 2017, Keir won a whopping 70.1% of the votes cast with 41,343 voters putting their X in his box. His majority dipped slightly in the next election of 2019 with 36,641 votes cast for him, or 64.5% of the share.
In early 2020 he ran for leadership of the Labour party and won it four months later, just as the country was facing the global Covid-19 pandemic. Keir was forced to work from his family home in Kentish Town while his wife Victoria went out to work in occupational health at her local NHS hospital. Keir has since claimed he knew the party would lose the 2019 election under predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended and eventually expelled from Labour over comments he made about the way complaints of antisemitism were dealt with internally.