Some call it unusual — unsupportive, even: Keir Starmer’s wife’s decision to stay largely out of the limelight in the lead up to the election (aside from two rare couples appearances at a Taylor Swift concert and an election rally in June). Others call Victoria Starmer’s low public profile refreshing: a welcome step away from the wife-on-the-campaign-trail trope, where partners are often wheeled out in a bid to boost their husband’s family man image.
“She’s quite sassy in that she’s quite unbothered by what he’s doing,” Labour insiders have said of the former solicitor, 50, who’s been nicknamed a “reluctant First Lady” and has somehow managed to maintain such a private profile that she doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia page (even Liz Truss’ s “quiet”, Philip May-type husband Hugh O’Leary had one). Following Labour’s landslide victory, Keir Starmer has become the next Prime Minister, but Victoria, it’s said, is “going to be very much leading her own life.”
So what does that life look like, exactly? Working for the NHS, caring for their two teenage children and hosting dinners for their tight circle of friends in Kentish Town, according to those who know Victoria Starmer, most of whom paint a picture of a chic, down-to-earth, quietly confident working mum who can be relied upon to take the mickey out of the Labour leader, 61, when he’s being too serious. “She won’t need a blow-dry every morning or a personal dresser,” say insiders of Victoria — Vic to her husband — on the Downing Street move. In fact, the general consensus is that she would rather not leave north London at all.
From her own Labour background to her cutting remark the first time she met Britain’s new PM, here’s what we know about the woman stepping into No10.
The north London schoolgirl who became student union president
Lady Vic, as she is affectionately known amongst Labour staffers, might do her best to steer clear of politics today, but her own political career began years before her husband’s.
She was raised in the affluent north London neighbourhood of Gospel Oak, just a stone’s throw from where she and her husband live now, and had one sister, Judith. Their father Bernard was an economics lecturer turned chartered accountant who was born in Hackney in 1929 as part of a Jewish family who arrived from Poland before the Second World War. Their mother Barbara was a Yorkshire-born community doctor who became a popular London GP and later converted to Judaism.
Growing up, Victoria Starmer — then Victoria Alexander and known by the nickname Vicky — attended Gospel Oak Primary School and later the £26,500-a-year, all-girls Channing School in Highgate, north London, before going on to study law and sociology at Cardiff University — the place her own political career began. As the university’s education and welfare officer in 1993, she fought against reforms proposed by then-Tory education secretary John Patten, such as ending ‘closed shop’ unions and cuts to funding for political activities — battles that helped her to win a landslide victory to become student union president the following year, a post-graduate role that former Labour leader Neil Kinnock had held 30 years previously.
“The three words on my ballot were ‘Make My Day’. Thank you Cardiff for doing it,” a then-21-year-old Vicky reportedly said after her win by 1,153 votes, a majority of 528 over her closest rival. Reporters for the student newspaper gushed about her “windswept look” and “f***ing corny, f***ing excellent” reaction to her victory at the time.
“Vicky Alexander’s ‘windswept’ look must have played its part in her massive majority”, said the paper, but her “excellent manifesto did swing the electorate and proved she was a winner”. The role earned her the equivalent of £22,000 a year in today’s money and saw her responsible for a £5.3m budget. “Sharp-suited Vicky is a far cry from the image of a scruffy subversive as she bustles between meetings with college officials and accountants,” said a profile in the Wales on Sunday newspaper, while Rob Watkins — then picture editor of the university’s student newspaper — remembers her as an impressive and popular campaigner known for always being armed with a walkie-talkie.
“She was a strong campaigner. I remember her taking the role very seriously. But she was also funny and confident and very good with people,” he says. “She was clearly very popular because she won more than two-thirds of the votes both times she was elected. You could tell that she cared a lot about what she did and the situation people found themselves in at university. She’d always be running around with a walkie-talkie at union events.”
After her year as union president, she returned to her hometown of London and became a volunteer for Tony Blair’s campaign HQ. She went onto qualify as a solicitor four years later, in 2001, and worked for Hodge Jones & Allen, a Soho law firm specialising in street crime. Insiders say she was known as an ambitious young lawyer with “eerily perfect hair and a slightly nasal voice” and that she’d often spend the early hours meeting clients in police stations.
An unromantic meet-cute that turned into a 17-year marriage
“Who the f*** does he think he is?”
These were the first words Victoria supposedly uttered after meeting her now-husband Keir Starmer for the first time. It was the early 2000s, before his appointment as director of public prosecutions. She was a solicitor and he was a senior barrister with Doughty Street Chambers and he’d just called her to discuss some documents for a court case. She found his obsessive fact-checking irritating, according to the Labour leader, who recounted his meeting with his wife on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2020.
“I was doing a case in court and it all depended on whether the documents were accurate,” he told Morgan. “I[asked my colleagues] who actually drew up these documents, they said a woman called Victoria, so I said let’s get her on the line.” He went onto question her about the papers apparently heard her mutter “Who the f*** does he think he is?” before hanging up the line.
It was an unlikely start for Britain’s new First Couple. But love blossomed. They found themselves placed next to each other at a legal dinner a few weeks later and Vic shared her vegetarian meal with him (he’d been given meat, despite being pescatarian). He persuaded her to go on a date with him to the Lord Stanley pub in Camden — now their local, and since deemed by their son to be the least romantic location he could imagine — and walked her to the bus stop afterwards. They quickly became an item. “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,” Keir has said of that now-notorious first phone call with his wife.
Their engagement — on a holiday to Santorini in Greece in 2004, just a few months after meeting — gives another insight into Vic’s no-nonsense attitude. “Won’t we need a ring, Keir?” she reportedly replied when tried to propose spontaneously.
The couple married three years later, on May 6, 2007, at a Georgian manor house on the Fennes Estate in Essex, with four best men present and Victoria walking into the wedding to the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The honeymoon on Italy’s Amalfi Coast was “the most romantic getaway”, according to Keir, who has since recounted how he lost his wedding ring on the trip and had to rummage through a bin of paper hand towels to retrieve it. Their son, 16, was born a year later, and two years later they had a daughter, 13.
After 17 years of marriage, the new PM says their love “gets stronger every day”. “Love and Vic are two sides of the same coin,” he said in an interview about their love story last month. “It sounds naff, but we’re made for each other... She makes me complete, who I really am... And we laugh a lot. Usually about all sorts of daft things the kids say.”
From ambitious solicitor to pillar of her north London postcode
Since stepping down from her job as a solicitor, Victoria has taken up two new roles: serving as a governor at her children’s school, and working in occupational health for the NHS in Camden — a job she reportedly loves and plans to continue even now her husband is PM. “I get a direct line of sight on a daily basis into the challenges of the NHS and the morale of the staff”, he has said of her job in the past. “She loves working for the NHS. She loves the team that she's working with.”
Up until now, the couple have lived in a £2m, four-bedroom townhouse in Kentish Town, which they bought for £650,000 in 2004 in the Labour leader’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency. His wallet is said to have ‘Take Me Home To Kentish Town’ emblazoned on the back of it — but it’s Victoria who is reportedly the fondest of the area. She is said to be a popular figure in the local parents’ networks there (the kids attended the local state primary school, Eleanor Palmer, and still walk to their local school every day today), hosting regular dinners for their tight circle of north London friends and joking that although her husband think it’s his constituency, it’s actually hers, according to Keir’s biography Tom Baldwin.
“They come in fairly regularly. Victoria is very nice and community-minded… She is a great presence,” says a barman at local pub The Pineapple.
Friends say life at home with the Starmers is just like any busy family with two teens: taking it in turns to deal with the cat; feeding their teen son with egg sandwiches while he takes his GCSEs; Vic tearing her hair out at Keir’s insistence at using every pan in the kitchen when he cooks on a Saturday night (Vic and her daughter are vegetarians; Keir’s a pescatarian). Family holidays are in the south of Wales, Friday nights see Keir clock off work after 6pm to spend time with his children (a fact that triggered a row last week, with Rishi Sunak insisting he hasn’t finished at six “ever”), and weekends are often spent with Keir taking the kids to Arsenal to watch the football, the sport he has long spoken about as his true passion.
Vic’s sporting passion, meanwhile, is horse-racing. Her mother was born and raised in Doncaster and her grandmother lived on the edge of the racecourse — a picture of which Victoria has up on the wall in the family home. “Vic’s mum had horseracing in her blood and Vic loves it, too,” Keir said recently. “She loves flat racing [not jumps because she thinks that’s cruel].”
Neither she or Keir are especially religious, but he has told interviewers that they make a point of honouring Jewish traditions, including taking the children to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood and observing traditional Shabbat dinners at home on Friday nights. Vic’s Jewish father Bernard lives on the same road as them and she regularly visits the nearby memorial for her mother, who passed away after a fall in 2020.
A down-to-earth, no-nonsense mother who balances her husband
“Sassy”. “Delightful”. “Very down-to-earth, smart and hardworking”.
These are just some of the terms friends and family have used to describe Victoria Starmer, who has somehow managed to maintain one of the lowest public profiles of any political spouse. “There are only nice things to be said, hand on heart,” says one north London mother. Others speak of her quiet confidence, her sense of humour and the fact that she refuses to be a “show pony” and do interviews or photo shoots. Her husband calls her “a streetwise, grounded, brilliant, gorgeous woman”.
Most pals call her Vic or Vicky, and praise her ability to ground not only herself but her husband, too. Vic is “literally the yin to [Keir]’s yang,” says Labour MP Carolyn Harris, a family friend, of Lady Starmer’s ability to balance her husband’s mild mannerisms. “They have a great dynamic – she spends quite a lot of time taking the mickey out of him because he can be so serious,” agrees a Labour insider.
Her husband agrees. “You should hear her in private,” he said recently, when asked about Vic’s ability to take the mickey. “She sees things for what they are. She gets people very quickly.”
She’s said not to be particularly bothered about the more glamorous side of the job — the couple’s only A-list friends are George and Amal Clooney from Keir’s legal days, once attending a boozy lunch at the Clooney’s 17th century Berkshire mansion — and not to like Keir’s advisors in the house. She is, however, the first person he rings before making any big political decisions. “He trusts almost no one in politics,” say insiders. But he knows he can rely on her both for advice and as a listening ear.
“After the first debate I was slightly frustrated because I didn’t think the 45 seconds to answer a question really worked for me,” Keir himself revealed after the first election TV debate opposite Rishi Sunak. “I know why the programme set it up in that way. So I was pretty sort of – ‘argh!’ – frustrated. I am not good company when I am in that place. But Vic cheered me up on that one.”
Reluctant First Lady — or hardworking mum who wants to protect her family?
Clapping for carers on the doorstep of their £1.75 million townhouse in Kentish Town. Accompanying her husband to a candlelit vigil for Sarah Everard. Smiling in the royal box at Wimbledon on the day Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister.
These are some of the rare public appearances Victoria Starmer has made alongside her husband in recent years. Her last major public outing before joining her husband on stage at a last-minute election rally appears to have been a state banquet at Buckingham Palace last November, and since then she has remained largely in the shadows, leaving Keir to take to the campaign trail with his gang of fellow politicos.
“It’s a real shame,” says one Labour MP who thinks the Labour leader’s arguably more glamorous and charismatic wife could help in boosting his popularity ahead of the election. “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.”
Insiders say Victoria is determined to maintain her own interests — and that it’s the children that drive her keen focus on family privacy. Their son is currently sitting his GCSEs (he’s taking 21 exams in total, and is reportedly interested in politics like his father), demanding a lot of time and attention. And the family home has already been the focus of unwarranted attention: just last month, Victoria told a court that she felt “sick” and apprehensive when pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated with children’s shoes outside their family home.
“She and I are doing our best to raise two happy and confident children and that matters hugely to us,” Keir said recently. “They have got teenagers who are completely freaked out by the idea of being in Downing Street or in any way being in the public eye,” says one Labour insider.
It’s for these reasons that politicos expect Victoria Starmer to continue leading her own life, even as her husband becomes PM. “She’s not going to be in the spotlight like Cherie Blair, but more of a background Sarah Brown type figure,” says a friend.
So just how reluctant is she to become the UK’s First Lady? Friends say she would rather not leave her north London bubble (“just to let you know, if you do win, I’m not coming,” their daughter reportedly teased recently) and although she is not a regular parliamentary socialite, she recognises the importance of duty.
“[Lady Starmer] had a friendly smile and made a beeline straight for us, so she clearly knows what is going on in Parliament,” said an MP who met her at this year’s Labour Party conference. She has reportedly told friends "we'll do what we need to do” if that duty calls, and that she will of course pose for photographs alongside her husband on the front steps of No10. “Victoria will stand by her man, the kids will use the back door,” say those who know her.
Expect classic, polished looks when she does take to the global stage, say fashion insiders who’ve long compared her glossy brunette hair and chic style with the Princess of Wales. “Vic is very glam,” agree senior party insiders. Tatler raved about her leather trouser and trainer look back in 2022, but away from the cameras she prefers to cut a casual image and is normally papped in jeans.
For all those that think they are “ordinary people “ this should actually say ‘Lord and Lady Victoria Starmer but it does not it quite sit well does it …..@UKLabour_Innit #awards #royals https://t.co/dMk96ge3xS
— neil sean (@neilseanshowbiz) June 30, 2024
“She’s never gone for the boho prairie look,” says a north London mother who knows Victoria from the school run. “She won’t need a blow-dry every morning or a personal dresser... Her style is very much cool north London mum”.
No hiring of boujie interior designers or £100-a-metre wallpaper disasters to be expected in the Starmer era, then, — but perhaps the odd horse-racing picture to hang on top of it. From north London working mum to First Lady of Downing Street — now that’s a memoir many of us would want to read.
