Britain has elected a 'political robot' as next PM. What to expect from Keir Starmer

As he stood alone on stage in front of a live TV audience in northern England last month, the man who is now the U.K.'s new prime minister momentarily appeared at a loss for words.

"You seem more like a political robot," an audience member said to Labour Leader Keir Starmer. "How are you going to convince others like me to vote for you?"

Starmer, an experienced human rights lawyer and Crown prosecutor with decades of public speaking behind him, stammered before eventually delivering what to many watching sounded like a rather robotic reply.

His experience running Britain's criminal prosecution service demonstrated his commitment to public service, he said, rather unconvincingly.

The next day as Starmer unveiled his party's platform — or manifesto as it's known in the U.K. — he again stood alone on stage but this time seemed better prepared for a similar question from a journalist.

As the acknowledged front-runner in the election contest, was he playing "Captain Caution" and trying to avoid taking any political risks?

"It's not about pantomime, we've had that," Starmer shot back. "I'm running as a candidate to be prime minister, not a candidate to run the circus."

Britons have become used to a fair amount of political theatre from their prime ministers: Boris Johnson's floppy hair and political buffoonery; his successor Liz Truss's stunningly unsuccessful 50-day reign, famously outlasted by a head of lettuce; and her successor Rishi Sunak's rain-drenched start to this year's campaign, after which he alienated war veterans by ditching D-Day commemorations early.

WATCH | British PM apologizes for leaving D-Day events early: 

British PM says leaving D-Day events early was a 'mistake'

6 months ago

Duration 0:50

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who recently called a general election, says he attended British D-Day events but left before an international leaders event. 'On reflection, that was a mistake and I apologize.'

Starmer, by contrast, barely made a wrong move, playing a classic front-runner campaign by avoiding controversy and sticking to the party's talking points.

With almost all the results in, Labour had won 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons to the Conservatives' 118.

With Starmer, not only does Britain appear to have veered to the left, but also toward a distinctly duller style of leadership.  

"He's come to be like the anti-Boris Johnson," said Steven Fielding, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who has written extensively on Britain's Labour Party.

Sir Keir's courtroom background

Starmer, 61, who was knighted "Sir Keir" in 2014 by the Queen for his services to "law and criminal justice," has followed a somewhat unconventional career path to reach 10 Downing Street.

Two decades ago, he was appointed as an adviser to the newly established police board in Northern Ireland that was set up as a result of the Good Friday agreement. Starmer said his main role was to build confidence in the policing institutions of the country by emphasizing fairness and impartiality. 

Success in that role led to his appointment as the head of the United Kingdom's Crown Prosecution Service, a significant position where he oversaw the criminal justice system for the entire country.  

Tom Baldwin, a longtime political journalist and former Labour party senior adviser who's written a biography on Starmer, says Starmer's courtroom background has left him with a "wooden" political persona that he has been trying to unlearn.

"[Performance] isn't the point of politics for him. The point is to get into power and pull the levers and start changing things," Baldwin told CBC News in an interview.

But Starmer's relatively late start in politics — he was first elected an MP in 2015 at the age of 52 — could also be a challenge, says Baldwin, as he may struggle to build the coalitions and support within caucus that leaders need to push their agendas forward. 

"It's about inspiring people; it's about taking people with you, and the ... Labour government will face some very tough times," said Baldwin. 

Labour moves to the centre

After its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, led Labour to its worst defeat in 80 years in a 2019 election, Starmer won the race to replace him and quickly jettisoned some of Labour's more extreme positions.

Corbyn was a fixture on the left wing of Labour and while he initially brought the party many new, younger members, beyond that base he fared poorly. He was eventually forced out of the party after he publicly disagreed with an independent review concluding there had been widespread incidents of antisemitism in Labour under his watch.

Once leader, Starmer worked quickly to move Labour back to the political centre.

He scrapped policies that were internally popular such as the nationalization of energy companies and free tuition for university and instead pivoted to policies that might just as easily have been written by Conservatives. 

"This is a manifesto for wealth creation," Starmer said when he released his party's agenda for government. 

Starmer says Labour will hire 13,000 new police officers, create 8,000 new jobs for teachers and reduce the waiting lists for the National Health Service, the public health-care system, by spending more than £1.3 billion ($2 billion Cdn) on staff overtime and new positions. The manifesto also calls for the creation of a new, government-owned energy company to invest billions of pounds in renewable energy.   

Labour has also promised to fix one million potholes on British roads every year.  

To pay for it all, Starmer says he will increase specific taxes, such as VAT on private schools and apply a new tax to British citizens who shelter their earnings abroad.  

"The changes he's made to the Labour party in two or three years — because he only started in 2021 — are extraordinary," said Baldwin, the Starmer biographer.

Starmer has repeatedly justified his policy U-turns to those on Labour's left by saying he intends to put the needs of the country before those of the party.

"The important thing in life is to hold your ideas up to the light and see if they withstand scrutiny, but that takes time," he told a BBC interviewer during an episode of the popular radio program Desert Island Discs, recorded in 2020 six months after he became party leader.

"I started off as the radical who knew everything," he said. "Now I am much more open to ideas, more questioning of ideas."

Comparisons between Starmer and Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Conservatives in 1997, may be inevitable, but the two men are quite different, says Fielding, the University of Nottingham politics professor.

"Tony Blair was an accomplished communicator, who was apt to be quite glib whereas Keir Starmer is much more overtly serious," he told CBC News.

"He comes across as a bit more dour — which might actually suit the [current] times a bit more." 

Policy-wise, Fielding says Starmer is also more of a traditional Labour politician than Blair was. 

"He's more in favour of using the government to supercharge a very ailing British economy."

The Conservative party, which had been in power since 2010 under five different prime ministers, saw its support bleed out to Labour on the left and to a resurgent Reform UK party on the right. (Reform won four seats, including one for leader Nigel Farage, securing a place in Parliament on his eighth attempt.)

Rishi Sunak, who took over as PM in October 2022, struggled to craft a convincing message about why the Conservatives deserve yet another mandate, with economic growth stalled and the party struggling to present a unified front on issues such as immigration.

The Conservatives took Britain out of the European Union after a surprising win by the "leave" side in the 2016 Brexit referendum, shaving more than £140 billion off the economy and costing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Subsequently, during Liz Truss's short term as prime minister, interest rates spiked after she released her budget and put the party on the defensive for most of Sunak's time in office.

Sunak took a chance by calling an early election after economic data this spring showed an unexpected uptick in growth, but the burst of activity was short-lived, as the next data report showed a return to stagnation.

For more than a year, various opinion polls showed the Tories trailing by at least 20 points — more than enough for a sizable Labour win, though just short of the 418 seats Blair won in 1997. 

Baldwin says the Labour leader has wisely avoided making grand promises for the country and instead has set the bar at making incremental gains in areas that directly impact people's lives.

"He's very determined not to get caught in the usual trap for Labour leaders of over-promising stuff," said Baldwin.

"But he does think … step by step … he can get Britain to a better place."