Hundreds and thousands of words have already been written about the public coming out of Lady Starmer of Dartmouth Park. When she celebrated her husband’s election win 12 days ago, she kissed herself into the history books.
This was the moment Sir Keir Starmer’s intensely private wife, Victoria, engaged with a media that had previously known almost nothing about her, a moment that was immediately compared to the one when David Cameron kissed his wife Samantha when he left Downing Street in 2016. This public display of affection was an uncharacteristic move from Starmer’s “reluctant First Lady” — but what hasn’t been explored is the effect she’s going to have on his own media profile.
Because conceivably she will be the secret sauce, the person who manages to humanise a man who looks increasingly automated, like a modern-day version of Max Headroom (or, according to various memes doing the rounds, like a conflation of Gogglebox stars Jenny Newby and Lee Riley).
When they mwah-mwahed each other in front of the cameras at Labour’s victory party, Starmer actually looked human for the first time since his predecessor called the election at the end of May. In the month or so afterwards he simply looked like a man who treated every media appearance as an assault course, one in which he could come a cropper by promising not to do something he had already decided to do but hadn’t told anyone. When Sir Tony Blair entered No 10, he looked like a man on a mission, whereas Starmer just looked relieved, happy he hadn’t tripped up enough to scupper his chances.
When Starmer and his wife kissed, the PM looked human for the first time
Previously, he certainly hadn’t exploited his wife in any shape or form. Asked on LBC about her low profile, Starmer pointed out that she had a full-time job at a hospital. Which sounded completely reasonable, actually.
However, his wife already looks like the kind of person who isn’t going to be happy when her husband comes back from PMQs with his tail between his legs. “He said what?” you can almost hear her say. “Why, I’ve got a mind to go round to his office right now and give him a good slap.” You can almost imagine her taking a handkerchief to his lips, giving them a good, hearty wipe and then pushing him back in the playground.
It’s going to be fascinating watching how she adapts to public life, and whether or not she embraces the kind of ancillary causes that previous Mrs Prime Ministers have done — a charity here, a book club there, a “secret” hospital visit pencilled in for next Tuesday. She is an incredibly photogenic woman and will make her husband shine like a statesman if she chooses to play dutifully. Of course she may do nothing of the kind, and simply fade back into her family and her own life. After all, we didn’t vote for her, only her husband, and — right now, at least — the public seem to find her low public profile refreshing: a welcome step away from the wife-on-the-campaign-trail super-trope, where partners are systematically wheeled out in a bid to boost their other half’s faltering image. There is certainly no need for her to change, nor currently any great desire from the media.
Then there is obviously also the possibility that she might start to enjoy the attention; admittedly it seems unlikely from what we know of her, but No 10 can do strange things to people.
There is a by-product of her presence that I doubt anyone has considered before, and that is the possibility that it might be time to think that no-drama Starmer might (whisper it) actually be a sex symbol. No, of course you don’t think so — as a love object you probably think he looks like a fridge with ageing superhero hair… but if his wife, his he-should-be-so-lucky wife thinks he’s hot, then maybe he is?
Alright, maybe I’ve gone too far, and quite possibly the tectonic shift we witnessed on July 4 has played havoc with my rationality, but at the very least the counter narrative presented by Victoria Starmer gives her husband a hinterland we’ve previously been completely uninterested in exploring. And that’s interesting.
