Lady Victoria Starmer is out of the shadows and into the spotlight

In the 1,550 or so days since he assumed the leadership of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer has been precise about the details he’s chosen to divulge about his personal and private life. He likes – no, loves – Arsenal Football Club. His father, you may have gleaned, made tools for a living. And he was a lawyer once.

But on his breakneck, four-year journey from merely picking up the pieces of a broken Opposition to presiding over a staggering electoral landslide, becoming only the sixth individual to serve as Labour prime minister in history – and the first for 14 years – the people closest to him, namely his wife, Lady Victoria Starmer, and their two teenage children, have been seldom seen. In the case of the children, they’ve never appeared with him publicly.

Whether the family edge into the spotlight, now that Sir Keir is Prime Minister, remains to be seen. Most expect the couple to continue to shield their children, who are 13 and 15, from the fierce glare of the media and public opinion. But what Lady Starmer does is another matter. Until today, when she travelled to Buckingham Palace for her husband’s first meeting with the King as PM, and then walked up Downing Street to enter her new home, Victoria had hardly been seen throughout the six-week election campaign.

All requests for interviews, comments, or the kind of off-the-record briefings by friends which tend to make up the way media-shy political spouses communicate with the electorate were met with a wall of silence by Sir Keir’s team. “We aren’t encouraging pieces on her,” the Labour leader’s office said early on. “Mrs Starmer will NOT be giving interviews.”

She still isn’t giving interviews, but she has become more visible. Lady Starmer finally stepped out with her husband last weekend, joining him on stage after a rally speech in central London. She then appeared with him on polling day, wearing a vivid red dress while joining him to cast their votes.

Outside of the campaign, she joined him at Buckingham Palace for the state banquet in honour of the visit of Japanese Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako the week before. And away from politics entirely, days earlier they attended a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley Stadium. “Purely as a piece of communication, this picture of Keir and Victoria Starmer at Taylor Swift speaks a million words. His rivals look angry, old, unhealthy, flabby, tired…” the media commentator David Yelland wrote of an image of the couple at the gig.

And in the early hours of Friday, looking remarkably sprightly and clean given the time, Lady Starmer was there for Sir Keir’s victory in Holborn and St Pancras. A few hours later, she was still by his side when he slowly descended upon Downing Street as the new Prime Minister. Dressed in sleek, tailored, on-brand red, Lady Starmer, the de facto new “first lady”, smiled and waved to the crowds and turned to walk into her new home in No 10. A penny for her thoughts, though. Because, by all accounts, it wasn’t a move she was desperate to make.

According to her husband, Lady Starmer was always eager to push his ambition in the legal field, but had reservations about him becoming a politician. “My wife was ringing adverts in the papers about well-paid lawyers’ jobs and I said, ‘No, I want to serve my country’, which is why, at a late stage, I came into politics…” he told Sky recently.

Asked if his attention-averse wife was happy about that, Sir Keir replied: “No, she wasn’t at all; she thought it’d be far better to continue being a lawyer on a reasonable salary and not have all the challenges you get as a politician.”

The Starmers have had a taste of that scrutiny lately, closer to home than they’d have liked. For many nights in recent months, the streets around their (former) family home in Kentish Town, north London, reverberated with the sound of protest.

During “Gaza Week” in Sir Keir’s constituency last month, the drum chants were noisy. “Stop the genocide! End Israeli apartheid!” the protestors shouted, with leaflets depicting the Labour leader’s face splattered with blood. “We’re taking over Keir Starmer’s neighbourhood to create a space for educating, learning, mobilising, sharing and building community resistance to show him that Camden stands with Gaza” was the message, sent loud and clear.

Until this year, aside from spotting Sir Keir and Lady Starmer – or “Lady Vic” as she is affectionately known among Labour staff (but just “Vic” in the area) – at the Peckwater Estate polling centre as they cast their votes, or seeing Sir Keir’s motorcade pass down Leighton Road in the early morning, the presence of the future “first couple” in NW5 had caused no ripples.

The Starmers have been a big part of that tight-knit inner-city neighbourhood. Their two children attended Eleanor Palmer, the local primary school. Lady Starmer is an occupational health worker for the NHS in Camden, and a popular figure in the local mums’ networks. Understandably, residents are protective of their famous – and now incredibly powerful – neighbours.

And so, too, are the Starmers keen to keep themselves out of the spotlight. Lady Starmer was said to be highly resistant to the idea of breaking up the family’s happy existence in the leafy streets near Hampstead Heath, and did her best to stay out of the general election campaign until the moment she couldn’t possibly stay away any longer.

Vivacious and glamorous as she is, usually appearing in Labour red on the few occasions she has joined her husband at events, Lady Starmer could be just as much as a popular and humanising a figure for Sir Keir as Samantha Cameron was to David, or Michelle Obama was to Barack. But she is not a trump card he has ever dealt since entering politics.

“It’s the children,” an influential Labour insider says of the reason for the Starmers’ fierce emphasis on privacy. “It has got pretty heavy recently with children’s shoes, representing the dead kids in Gaza, being left outside the Starmer house – Sir Keir is determined that his family won’t be dragged into any of this.”

Notably, there was no sign of the couple’s son and daughter when Sir Keir gave his first speech in Downing Street on Friday.

Though he may now be installed in Downing Street, some Labour figures worry this could cost him. Utterly sick though much of the nation was with Tory government, people still don’t entirely know who Sir Keir is. “We need to humanise him, but he’s a proud man and doesn’t like telling sob stories about his tricky upbringing – and we can’t use Vic to show a more colourful side of the man, because of him not wanting to involve the children,” a Labour MP says.

Still, attempts to deploy Lady Starmer have fallen on deaf ears in the Labour media camp.

“It’s a real shame, because Sir Keir is principled, tough, strategic and determined, the kind of man who is a planner and will make an excellent prime minister. But the trouble is, he doesn’t have the charisma for campaigning. He could really do with his wife telling people about the real Keir.”

Try as they might to deny there’s public interest, now that she is weighing up how to act as first lady, we could all do with knowing a little more about Lady Starmer, besides the basic facts that she always looks impeccable, is clearly in a deeply happy family and has her own career. And nothing sums up why people like her so much than the story of the first time she encountered the then plain-old Keir Starmer.

“Who the f--- does he think he is?” the then Victoria Alexander said, with pleasing bluntness, about her future husband. At the time, in the early 2000s, she was a solicitor in London, and had an ambitious young QC with a slightly nasal voice on the phone.

“[Starmer] rang her and, having never spoken to her before, queried whether the brief she had sent him was less than ‘100 per cent accurate’,” Sir Keir’s unofficial biographer, Nigel Cawthorne, the author of Keir Starmer: A Life of Contrasts, wrote.

“Unflustered, Victoria firmly held her ground against the person on the other end of the line, reassuring him that she knew her job and, after putting the phone down, said the fateful line. Only she hadn’t asked “Who the f*** does he think he is?” after she put the phone down, according to Sir Keir, who told Vogue this year that he in fact heard her mutter it.

“You might think, ‘Not the best of starts’, but it was absolutely classic Vic. Very sassy, very down to earth, no nonsense from anyone, including from me,” he said. A family friend, the Labour MP Carolyn Harris, agreed they were “very much” characteristic of a woman who balances her husband’s (sometimes too) mild manner. Lady Starmer is, Harris said, “a litmus paper, the yin to his yang”.

Victoria Alexander was raised in the affluent north London suburb of Gospel Oak. Her father was born in Britain as part of a Jewish family who arrived from Poland before the Second World War. Her mother was a community doctor, and it’s been reported that her sister, Judith, once taught at Gospel Oak primary, which Lady Starmer attended before joining the private day school Channing in Highgate.

While neither is especially religious, Sir Keir has said that he and his wife make a point of honouring Jewish traditions, including taking their children to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. He was mocked, somewhat bizarrely, for insisting last week that he will protect family time with the children, especially on Fridays.

“We’ve had a strategy in place and we’ll try to keep to it, which is to carve out really protected time for the kids. So on a Friday – I’ve been doing this for years – I will not do a work-related thing after six o’clock, pretty well come what may,” he told Virgin Radio.

On the Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs in 2020, he elaborated on the role faith plays in the family. “It is perfectly true that my wife’s father is Jewish – they came from Poland – and my wife’s mother converted when they got married. There is a long tradition of family and faith there. We observe some of the practices, for example Friday-night prayers, occasionally with my wife’s father – her mum sadly passed away earlier this year,” he said. “My wife in particular wants our children to know the faith of her family.”

Lady Starmer, who is younger than Sir Keir but whose precise date of birth hasn’t been publicly revealed, studied law and sociology at Cardiff University, and, according to Tom Baldwin’s recent book Keir Starmer: The Biography, became president of the student union – like Neil Kinnock decades before her. She later volunteered in Tony Blair’s campaign headquarters in 1997, and became a solicitor in London, initially specialising in street crime in Soho.

It was around that time when she found out who the f--- Keir Starmer was, and after meeting at a legal dinner, agreed to a first date at the Lord Stanley pub in north London, which evidently went well. Starmer, Baldwin writes, felt he had found someone “grounded, sassy, funny, streetwise – and utterly gorgeous too”. He proposed, spontaneously, on holiday in Greece. “Won’t we need a ring, Keir?” she replied.

They were married on May 6 2007, with a cabinet of four best men present, and honeymooned on the Amalfi coast in Italy. A year later, their son arrived. He will turn 16 soon. In 2010, a daughter followed. It’s fair to say those are difficult ages to suddenly have your father become the prime minister, and to move into the heart of Westminster.

“I am worried about my children, that is probably the single thing that does keep me awake – as to how we will protect them through this,” Sir Keir told BBC journalist Nick Robinson recently. “At the moment we’re in the stage of – this is very much Vic – ‘let’s take each day as it comes’.

“So we don’t do the great planning or anything like that, that would be presumptuous. But we do try to protect them. We don’t name them in public. My boy is 15 and my girl is 12. I want to protect them. We don’t use photos of them in any way. I want to, for as long as I can, to preserve that space for them. But am I worried? I am worried.”

Lady Starmer retrained in occupational health after having children, and still works in the NHS (“I get a direct line of sight on a daily basis into the challenges of the NHS and the morale of the staff”, her husband has said), but has otherwise been committed to Kentish Town, where the family have lived in a handsome four-bedroom terraced house for 20 years.

According to Baldwin, she allegedly told him: “If it happens [becoming prime minister], I won’t want to leave Kentish Town.” He probably doesn’t want to be as far from his beloved Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal FC, as he will be, either. But it is Lady Starmer who is particularly wedded to the area. She jokes, Baldwin writes, that “although her husband thinks it’s his constituency, ‘it’s actually mine’”.

As a political wife, she has not been entirely hermitic. Occasionally seen on photo-op walkabouts with her husband, she is a stylish and popular figure at Labour conferences, and made her first prominent appearance at the 2021 Labour conference in Brighton.

Then, under the immediate scrutiny of a political spouse (her outfit on that occasion, a £269 navy blue eco-friendly polyester dress by French fashion house Claudie Pierlot, was immediately priced up by the news pages), she embraced her husband on stage after his speech.

Besides a handful of other public appearances, though, she remains little known – which it seems is precisely how she likes it. As the prospect of having to move from Kentish Town to a fairly poky flat above the shop a few miles south grew, she has had to come to terms with a very different life.

Once the excitement of the Labour landslide abates, she will now have to decide how she will play the part of the prime minister’s spouse. In some ways, she has already rewritten the rules: no husband or wife of a Labour or Conservative leader has been so absent from a campaign before, so it may be that she continues in that vein.

But there is no one correct way to approach being a first lady or “first gentleman”. Akshata Murty, Rishi Sunak’s wife and the most recent holder of the post, recently said her role was simply “to keep the show going”. Whether she did that or not is for the pundits to decide, but she certainly made her own headlines, not least over the non-dom tax scandal.

Hugh O’Leary, Liz Truss’s husband, barely had time to unpack his bags. Carrie Johnson, Boris Johnson’s wife, was vilified with the nicknames “Carrie Antoinette” and, in Dominic Cummings’s poetic way, “princess nut nut”. Samantha Cameron, who kept a very different career in fashion throughout her husband’s time in office, described herself as “not a very hands-on political wife” who often had no idea what was to be announced.

Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, focused on charity work while also helping with her husband’s PR, but later lamented not speaking out more. Cherie Blair was, at least for a time, as famous as her husband Tony. Norma Major led a “seen but not heard” existence. And Denis Thatcher summed up the role well with just four words: “always present, never there”.

What Lady Starmer decides to do remains to be seen. She may become an adviser to her husband. She may work to bolster Labour’s campaigning on healthcare, given her expertise. She may do something else. Or she may do nothing, as is her right, and simply stay where she is comfortable, rarely in Westminster and seldom seen before the cameras until the moment calls for it.

But for now, the public is still getting to know her. It seems a small thing, but it was telling that until only this week, she didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Even Hugh O’Leary has one of those. She’s got one now, though, and it’s just had its first line changed from “the wife of Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition” to “the wife of the leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom”.

Now, as she grows used to the idea of being Britain’s new first lady, Lady Victoria Starmer’s time in the shadows is surely over.