
Keir Rodney Starmer is a British politician who currently serves as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 5th July 2024.
He also serves as Leader of the Labour Party since 2020.
He served as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013 and Leader of the Opposition from 2020 to 2024 before being elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St. Pancras in 2015.
Here is all you should know about the new U.K Prime Minister;
1. Keir Starmer was born in London on September 2nd, 1962 and raised in Surrey.
2. Josephine, his mother, worked as a nurse for the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain and his father, Rodney Starmer, was a toolmaker.
4. Starmer attended the selective state Reigate Grammar School which became a private school while he was a student. He was politically active from an early age and joined the Labour Party Young Socialists at the age of 16.
5. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Leeds in 1985 and gained a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford in 1986.
6. After being called to the bar, Starmer practised predominantly in criminal defence work, specialising in human rights.
7. He served as a human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board and was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 2002, later citing his work on policing in Northern Ireland as being a key influence on his decision to pursue a political career.
8. During his time as Director of Public Prosecutions, he dealt with a number of major cases including the Stephen Lawrence murder case.
9. He once advocated for the abolition of the British monarchy before kneeling in front of Charles, the prince of Wales, to be knighted.
10. He was also allegedly the model for a darkly attractive character in the Bridget Jones films in the 1990s. He recently demonstrated his support for Black Lives Matter by kneeling.
11. Starmer, a 61-year-old fiscal moderate and social liberal, is the head of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.
12. He was elected to the parliament in 2015 and has led the opposition since 2020, making him the principal adversary of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
13. Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist who founded the Labour Party in 1900, may have been the inspiration for Keir Starmer’s name, according to Tom Baldwin, the author of Keir Starmer: The Biography. Starmer’s parents were “proper old-fashioned socialists.”
14. Starmer is married to Victoria Alexander and together they have two children, he is a keen footballer, having played for Homerton Academics, a north London amateur team, and he supports Premier League side Arsenal.
15. On 5th July, 2024, Starmer led Labour Party to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, ending fourteen years of Conservative rule, succeeding Sunak as prime minister.
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