FMinutes into Thursday night’s exit polls, no one was saying anything. About a dozen of Keir Starmer’s closest and longest-serving aides gathered at the back of the living room and turned to hug each other. Some sobbed as painful exhaustion was mixed with relief and joy.
More intense emotions unfolded before their eyes. Starmer, his wife Vic, and their two teenage children lined up on the sofa to watch TV as if they were reenacting the beginning of the cartoon series The Simpsons. They tried to show they were relaxing in the fancy house Starmer had borrowed from a friend. Their son wore an Arsenal shirt while their daughter told him she had no intention of moving to Downing Street, giving everyone a laugh as her dad’s face came up on the screen and she let out a long “Ewww” excuse.
At 9:59 p.m., the countdown begins. Starmer and his wife locked their bodies together. Vic’s left arm reached over his shoulder and held his left hand while he did the same for her right hand. “When Big Ben struck 10, exit polls predicted a landslide Labor victory,” the BBC said. “Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister with a majority of around 170 seats.”
The man they were talking about put his arms around his wife and gave her a luxurious kiss. Then he reached for his 13-year-old daughter. They hugged for a moment, but when he realized it was getting too much, he suddenly squeezed his hand tighter, protectively. I looked away and stared at the TV, which kept blaring. The room suddenly felt hot, and not for the first time since I started writing Starmer’s biography two years ago, I knew it was intruding on something deeply personal.
In dozens of interviews and profiles, he described “sleepless nights” worrying about the impact becoming prime minister would have on his children. Maybe that’s what you’d expect a politician to say. But if they could see him sitting on the couch with his family, receiving the news that their lives were about to change forever, even the most cynical would soften.
I found myself wondering once again why this self-sufficient, rather private man would choose to put himself through this. The job he worked so hard to get may not necessarily bring a lot of happiness. A dire economic legacy awaits him, along with shaky public services and dark international skies, and even sympathetic commentators predict he will become deeply unpopular within a year.
Nor is he one of those people who declared as a child that he wanted to be “King of the World” or who spent his teenage years pretending to stand outside Downing Street practicing his speeches in the mirror. Instead, he was a latecomer to politics who eschewed “starism” – or any other “ism” – and insisted that all he wanted was to “get things done.”
Back in the room Thursday night, his communications director, Matthew Doyle, broke his silence and said, “Well, we won.” The mood lightened. Starmer walked away for several minutes, hugging each other and talking quietly.
Some people present went to the buffet table to try the food and cheese prepared for them, but they had not much wanted to eat it before. No one drinks. Vic is on the phone. “Dad,” she said, “turn on the TV. They’ve done the exit polls… No! I’m not kidding! They’re out… Yes, we won!
Then the internet went down. There was no Wi-Fi, no television, and the Prime Minister-elect was cut off from the outside world. “It’s a little frustrating,” he said with characteristic understatement.
when he went upstairs to see if he could get a signal. Chief of staff Sue Gray, recruited from the civil service last year, shouted at him that security would take his phone away when he arrived at Number 10.
“No, they won’t!” came the reply from the top of the stairs (the Prime Minister still had it when I checked at lunchtime on Saturday).
Down the stairs, his team was joking about their communications glitch. “It’s very quiet,” one of them said. “Maybe we can stay here and come out in four years and see how everything goes,” another commented.
But no one stayed there for long. Gray wanted to go to south London, where his son’s votes to become a Labor MP were being counted. Others were preparing to head to Starmer’s earldom of Camden. There are many more people who are eager to do some work at the party headquarters. Starmer still has a few hours before he leaves. “Are you going to take a nap?” I asked him as we were leaving.
“No,” he said, tilting his head and smiling to admit that he probably should. “No, I will not.”
His celebrations Thursday night were quiet but intense, in stark contrast to the excitement of the final day of the campaign. On Wednesday, he traveled through Wales, Scotland and England using “planes, trains and cars”. His speaking style, often criticized as wooden, has improved and he is able to engage audiences with an urgency and enthusiasm that is not always apparent.
Even so, away from the camera, the Labor leader strikes me as sitting alone and quietly at the front of the plane, lost in thought, one hand covering one side of his face so he can ignore the constant sneaking Airline stewardess. Advisers say he became more like this in his final days, as he began to shift from opposition to government.
There was a similar agony at the end of the six-week tour, which clocked in at 8,204 miles, “the equivalent of 38,000 laps of Wembley Stadium,” according to a helpful briefing. On his final journey back to London, Starmer stepped off the train carriage and quietly thanked every member of the close-knit team, including his police protection, for all they had done. Sitting there and listening again, it felt like I was invading another kind of family’s private moment.
In fact, in the final two days of the campaign, parents of team members began showing up at his rallies. At Cannock Chase on Tuesday, he heard his private secretary Prentice Hazell’s mother Leanne was in the audience, so he went to chat to her later. In Carmarthen on Wednesday, it’s Suzy and Guy Pullen’s turn to meet the future Prime Minister. Their son Tom, who has been Starmer’s official photographer for the past four years, later said: “If you’re proud of what you do, you ask your parents to come to something. I think if If they’re proud of it too, they’ll show up.
Later in the day, the mother of Jill Cuthbertson, the Labor leader’s chief of staff, watched him deliver his final campaign speech in Scotland at the Caledonian Gladiators basketball stadium. Often, she would bring a clean outfit for her daughter because she thought “Jill might need it in the next day or two.”
The young Cuthbertson emerged as a formidable figure after a campaign in which she was widely seen as having avoided the mistakes Rishi Sunak makes almost every day. This sense of organizational involvement can be found in the “operating instructions” prepared daily, which lay out the minute-by-minute logistics of the operation. One on Wednesday was 15 pages long.
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Another sign of Labour’s take-no-prisoners attitude was the baby waiting on the basketball court at the end of that day’s rally. Some Labor supporters there wanted a photo of Starmer with their newborn child, not least because it is an old campaign tradition for politicians to kiss them. But Labor aides decided it was too risky to do so in front of the media, so the Labor leader walked over to meet them only after the media had left the room.
As soon as he picked up one of the baby girls, he heard a familiar gurgling sound and she began to feel sick to him. “Ah, what are you doing here?” Starmer said with a smile. “I probably need to give you back to your mother.” Anas Sarwar, the ebullient Scottish Labor leader, said: “When she grows up, she will be able to say she vomited on the Prime Minister.”
Labor held a victory party at the Tate Modern in the early hours of Friday morning, and there was no “vomiting”, at least not due to alcohol. Guests will receive a pink ticket with “one drink” written on it. The woman at the door said: “It was originally five yuan, but that’s all you got. This was a decision made by the top management.”
Starmer himself delivered a similar message of sobriety when he addressed the gathering at 5am. Although he spoke of “the rays of hope, pale at first but shining again as the day grew stronger”, the day was not far off when rain would pour down in London from Friday. He spoke of the need for “hard work, patient work, determined work” when the going gets tough, adding: “The fight for trust is the defining battle of our time.”
When he arrived at Downing Street at lunchtime on Friday, his motorcade was delayed until the weather improved as aides hoped to avoid a repeat of Sunak getting soaked at the start of the election. Burden” which would “restore service and respectable politics, end the era of loud showmanship, live with ease and unite our country”.
The language reflected his unease with the election results, which despite Labor winning a huge majority, signaled new fissures in Britain. Not only is the far-right Reform Party gaining a foothold in parliament for the first time, but the success of pro-Palestinian independent candidates and the Green Party suggests the battlefield is changing and that a Labor government will have to face attacks from multiple fronts.
His campaign, led by Morgan McSweeney, is already looking at the difficulties other centrist and center-left leaders face in confronting the populist right. They include an early decision by Joe Biden’s U.S. administration to reverse much of Trump-era immigration policy. They argue that some of the net-zero policies of Olaf Scholz’s government in Germany have opened the door to far-right attacks on “ecological dictatorships”, while in the UK such measures should be described as building “energy security”.
Papers with unedifying titles such as “The Death of Deliverism” have circulated, suggesting that large-scale investment projects will do little to stop populists from “riding the wave” unless there is a daily crisis in living standards and potholes or sewage flooding. Problems such as rivers were not quickly resolved.
There are also signs that even if Starmer has a parliamentary majority, he may have to consider a closer working relationship with other centrist parties such as the Lib Dems or even if he wants to build a stable coalition among unstable voters. electoral relations.
There are already more and more problems at home and abroad. He must also come to terms with the personal upheaval of moving his family into a Downing Street goldfish bowl, where the privacy of his children may not be protected.
But maybe he could learn from them. When his son recently completed his GCSE exams, he immediately put all his revision notes, books and school uniform into a box to throw away. The Prime Minister’s voice was filled with proud laughter as he told the story.
Like his son, he knew he needed to get rid of what was no longer needed without much emotion if they were to take on the next challenge.
Turns out Starmers are pretty good at this sort of thing.
