Sir Keir Rodney Starmer is a British politician and former lawyer who has served as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition since 2020. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015. Ideologically, Starmer identifies as a socialist and has been described as being on the soft left within the Labour Party.
Starmer was born in London and raised in Surrey, where he attended the selective state Reigate Grammar School, which became an independent school while he was a student. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws 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.
After qualifying for the bar, Starmer acted exclusively as a defence lawyer, specialising in human rights issues as a member of Doughty Street Chambers, before being named a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 2002. In 2008, he became Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), holding these roles until 2013. On conclusion of his five-year term as Director of Public Prosecutions, he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2014 New Year Honours.
Elected to the House of Commons in the 2015 general election, Starmer became Shadow Minister for Immigration in 2015 before being appointed to the Shadow Cabinet in October 2016 as Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union after Britain voted to leave the European Union. Starmer advocated a second referendum on Brexit, saying he would have voted to remain. After Labour's defeat in the 2019 general election, Starmer was elected to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in April 2020. Starmer's tenure as leader has been marked by his opposition to some of the Conservative government's COVID-19 pandemic measures, and has included removing the party whip from his predecessor, a by-election loss in the previously Labour seat Hartlepool and a hold in Batley and Spen, with mixed results in the 2021 local elections.
