Even his own biographer acknowledges that Keir Starmer’s public image tends towards the grey and opaque. And if there’s a phrase that that Starmer himself has over-used during the election, doing little to burnish that image, it’s the one about his childhood home being a pebble-dashed semi and that his father was a toolmaker.

Through sheer repetition, says Tom Baldwin, author of Keir Starmer: The Biography, these lines have become “the object of eye-rolling ridicule for the sneerier parts of the media”. The Labour leader has even, to his irritation, been mocked by TV audiences when he’s brought up his late father’s job.

According to some of his oldest friends, Starmer simply wasn’t the type to talk endlessly about himself, and he generally disapproved of those who did. Now, however, as he becomes Labour’s seventh Prime Minister, ending 14 long years of Conservative dominance, his personal story has been fleshed out by long interviews, by Baldwin’s extensively-researched, 400-page, biography, and by a sheaf of detailed profiles carried out by newspaper features writers.

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Starmer, 61, who is named after Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party. Away from the political front-line he is someone who enjoys a pint and is a keen Sunday footballer. He has for decades experienced the ups and downs that come from being a supporter of Arsenal. He is married to Victoria, Lady Starmer, who trained as a solicitor and now works in occupational health for the NHS. They have two teenage children but, intent on keeping life as normal as possible for them, have never publicly named them.

Starmer made his name as a human-rights lawyer before being appointed as Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales. Knighted in 2014, he was elected to Parliament in 2015, at the age of 52, and replaced Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in April 2020.

The nearer that Starmer gets to Downing Street, lots of interesting stories have emerged about his past.

Including, of course, the one about the donkey sanctuary.

It began with Starmer’s parents, Rod and Jo, who worked as an NHS nurse. They given two donkeys to look after by people who were moving away. They kept Jo company while Rod was at work. Other donkeys followed. In time, Keir, their eldest son, bought them a field behind their house in the Surrey village of Hurst Green, where the small herd could roam to their hearts’ content. According to Baldwin, Starmer, who by then was an ambitious young lawyer, would sometimes surprise his colleagues by sprinting away from court because he was on ‘donkey duty’.

Starmer was one of four children born to Rod and Jo. His mother had been diagnosed before her teens with Still’s disease, a relatively rare immune condition; it left her, writes Baldwin, with severe rheumatoid arthritis. Cortisone injections gave her some mobility and meant that she and Rod were over the years able to make dozens of walking trips with the family in the Lake District.

As for his father, Starmer has spoken movingly about the older man’s emotional distance and occasionally cussed behaviour. When Rod died in November 2018, three years after Jo passed away, Starmer gave the eulogy at his funeral and said: “Since we're in a church I had better be truthful. He was a difficult sod”. The assembled mourners nodded and laughed.

Keir Starmer on the campaign trailKeir Starmer on the campaign trail (Image: free)

Starmer did well at Reigate Grammar School. During his time there he and his friend Andrew Sullivan (who today is a prominent US commentator) would have noisy arguments on the top deck of the bus taking them to school - news of which sometimes reached the disapproving headmaster.

Sullivan, speaking to Baldwin, remembers Starmer as “a bit of a wild man, without any of that lawyerly restraint you see today. Starmer, says another school friend, was someone “who certainly knew how to look after himself and would defend his space… Keir had a bit of a reputation as one of the hard lads. He’d be the first to take the piss out of the teachers”.

At school Starmer came across a pupil named Quentin Cook who, years later, would find fame as Fatboy Slim. Starmer was also a talented flautist, good enough to earn a youth scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music, to which he would make his way on Saturday mornings.

A key chapter in his life opened up when he moved, aged 18, to Leeds to study at university. He befriended a music-mad student, John Murray; together, the teens went to see indie groups such as Orange Juice and Aztec Camera (both of them well-known Scottish bands)

Leeds had a lasting impact on the young Starmer. “The three years here was something that went deep in my bones, and I’ve carried that bit of Leeds with me ever since,” he said in a recent interview with Leeds Magazine.

Keir Starmer with VictoriaKeir Starmer with Victoria (Image: free)

Starmer, who was renowned amongst his friends for having a ferocious work ethic and formidable powers of concentration, soon discovered that international law and human rights spoke more to his personal beliefs than the relatively drier subject he had hitherto been studying. He graduated with a first-class degree in law in 1985. Intent on becoming a barrister in the field of human rights, he went on to Oxford University, where he earned, in 1986, a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree.

He obtained his qualifications as a lawyer in 1987 and began working as a barrister. He often applied his powerful skills to defending the underdog, as in the infamous, decade-long McLibel case, in which he advised, pro bono, two spirited activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, in their David v Goliath battle against the deep-pocketed multinational that is McDonald’s.

He went on act for the miners’ unions in relation to pit closures and their struggle to win compensation for miners suffering from the condition known as vibration white finger. 

He was Joint Head of the progressive barristers’ chambers, Doughty Street Chambers, specialising in human rights and international and criminal law. He conducted cases before the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights, was called to the Bar in the Bahamas, and St Lucia, and worked on cases in Uganda and Kenya.

He was named Human Rights Lawyer of the Year in 2001, and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002. In 2005 he won a Bar Council award for his outstanding contribution to pro bono work in challenging the death penalty throughout the Caribbean and also in Uganda, Kenya and Malawi.

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In November 2008 he began his role as DPP. Numerous high-profile cases crossed his desk during his five years there, from the turbulent scandals surrounding MPs’ expenses and phone-hacking to Jean Charles de Menezes, the Scots computer hacker Gary McKinnon, and the death of the G20 protester Ian Tomlinson.

Now, after a most accomplished legal career, Keir Starmer has become Prime Minister. We are about to find out an awful lot more about him as he begins the painstaking task of succeeding Rishi Sunak and seeks to turn the country's fortunes around over the next few years.

The Sunday Times Magazine journalist Josh Glancy, who shadowed Starmer around the country for three months, came to know him pretty well. As Glancy observed the other weekend, Starmer has a good sense of humour, is genial and relaxed company, likes a pint or two and enjoys arguing about football. He is, in many ways, a “pretty normal bloke”.

“What I’ve found”, Glancy went on, however, “is someone as kind as he is ruthless, densely resilient yet also thin-skinned, coursing with emotion but deeply repressed. Starmer seems a man unwilling, or unable (or possibly both) to perform the public role that many people expect him to: the charismatic leader, the nimble debater, the warm, jocular father of the nation.”

Keir Starmer: The Biography, by Tom Baldwin (William Collins, £25)