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Keir Starmer is the new Prime Minister of Great Britain after his Labour Party won the election on Thursday.
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Help from an unexpected source helped him reveal his personal story: Barack Obama.
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The relationship could continue even after Starmer takes office.
The British have voted and a radical change of leadership is imminent in the United Kingdom.
The left-wing Labour Party has won more than 400 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, meaning its leader Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister and the Conservative Party’s 14-year rule will be over.
“The change starts now,” Starmer said at a rally early Friday morning as the results began pouring in. His victory came despite the fact that he is often accused of lacking charisma.
Jill Rutter, a research fellow at the London-based research group UK in a Changing Europe, told the New York Times that he “does indeed look relatively like a prime minister,” but added: “He will not set hearts racing.”
Starmer entered politics relatively late. He was only elected to the British House of Commons in 2015, at the age of 52. Before that, he was a lawyer and rose to become Attorney General for England and Wales. He was very visible in public, but did not have to ask the people for votes.
As a candidate for high office, Starmer had no choice but to tell his backstory. After becoming Labour leader in 2020, he emphasised his humble roots, often describing how his father worked as a toolmaker and his mother as a nurse while they raised their children in a “pebbled semi-detached house”, a small house next to another property.
But Starmer has at times seemed uncomfortable with the public display of emotion required to tell his story, even though it represents political capital that contrasts sharply with outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker, is married to Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire and Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy. The Sunday Times reported in May that the couple’s net worth is £651 million, equivalent to about $830 million.
In recent months, Starmer has made great efforts to appear more relatable to voters and to highlight this contrast.
He was supported by an unusual mentor: former US President Barack Obama.
Obama encouraged Starmer to show vulnerability
Obama, who served as US president from 2009 to 2017, encouraged Starmer in a series of Zoom calls to become more open and vulnerable with the public and spoke to the Labour leader about the difficult decisions he made in the Oval Office.
As Politico reported, the two were first introduced by David Lammy, one of Starmer’s key confidants who will become his foreign minister if the Labour Party wins.
In March, Lammy said on Politico’s “Power Play” podcast that he and Obama had known each other for 20 years, since meeting at an event for black graduates at Harvard University.
When Obama stopped by to meet Sunak in March, he also met Lammy for dinner, The Telegraph reported.
Lammy said Obama’s influence on Starmer was evident when the Labour leader recently “spoke much more openly about his family history than we may have seen just a few years ago”.
“And I know Obama firmly believes that Keir should do this,” he added.
Lammy spoke after Starmer gave a wide-ranging interview to Sky News in which he described his mother suffering from Still’s disease, a rare form of inflammatory arthritis.
He said his father spent most of his time caring for them, which “narrowed” his “emotional space” and led to greater emotional distance between him and his children.
“I probably should have raised this before he died and I wish I had, but I didn’t,” Starmer added.
Kitty Donaldson, a political journalist in the UK, told Business Insider that the interview marked a turning point in Starmer’s public outburst.
“Up until that point, Starmer was very stiff, very practical and very prudish,” Donaldson said, adding that Obama had been “open-minded” and had “given Starmer permission” to open up.
“In terms of his leadership style, it’s had an impact,” she said. “Obama is pretty laid back. This campaign was more relaxed than anything we’ve seen before, and he seemed to enjoy traveling around the country and talking to people.”
Tom Packer, a volunteer research fellow at University College London who specialises in US politics and elections, told BI that Starmer’s backstory had become a “campaign theme”.
He said this helped to challenge the idea that all British politicians came from “noble backgrounds” anyway.
Obama could advise Starmer on how to deal with Trump
The relationship between Obama and Starmer is likely to continue if Starmer wins the election on Thursday.
Obama had been helping Starmer since at least 2021, when The Guardian reported that the two had spent two hours in private discussions with Lammy about how the center-left parties could return to power.
In September, Starmer said on the podcast “Power Play” that Obama was the US president he spoke to “most often”.
“I have spoken to him several times and his analysis of the world is always interesting, his challenges. It is just interesting to go through with him what he has experienced and how he has faced the challenges,” Starmer said.
“It’s always useful to test my ideas on people who have won elections, people who have made difficult decisions while in power, because it helps me think about how we might approach some of the decisions we have to make if we win the election,” he added.
Packer said the relationship between Obama and Starmer made sense given the decades-long ties between the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party.
Donaldson, meanwhile, suggested that Starmer might seek advice from Obama on how to deal with Donald Trump if the former president is re-elected in November.
Trump is ahead in the polls and Biden’s shaky performance in the first presidential debate on June 27 has caused panic among Democrats and they are urging him to make way for another candidate.
Speaking to Politico last September, Starmer said his team had held discussions with Biden, adding: “It’s clear what my desired outcome would be.”
Packer told BI that Starmer and his team did not want to “put all their eggs in one basket” and, despite their political differences, were committed to “building some kind of working relationship with Trump.”
Trump “finds it difficult to be mean to people who are nice to him,” Packer said.
He added that if Starmer was “nice”, a Labour government could end up building a good relationship with Trump “even if they disagree on policy issues”.
He pointed out that Starmer had been careful to avoid anti-Trump comments during his election campaign.
In an interview with BBC Radio 5 last week, Starmer was asked whether he agreed with Lammy’s 2018 description of Trump as a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”.
“Those are words I have never used,” Starmer replied.
“I know that it is the job of the person who leads our country to negotiate with the leaders of other countries who are elected by their people. You cannot always choose the leaders of other countries,” he continued.
Lammy has also softened his stance. At a summit in May, he said Trump’s position on European defense had been “misunderstood” and that he simply wanted “Europeans to do more to ensure a better-defended Europe,” Politico reports.
After Trump was convicted of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, Starmer called it “unprecedented.”
However, he said, “We will work with whoever is elected,” adding, “We have a special relationship with the United States that goes beyond the role of the president.”
Correction: July 4, 2024 – An earlier version of this story misspelled NR Narayana Murthy’s last name as “Murty.” It also misspelled the date of the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden. It was June 27, not June 28.
Read the original article on Business Insider
