Lady Victoria Starmer: The wife of the Labour Party leader in profile
Former solicitor highly private and has made few public appearances but her husband’s growing prominence threatens to draw her into the national spotlight
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Your support makes all the difference.As the popularity of the opposition Labour Party surges in the polls following Liz Truss’s disastrous start to life in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer is increasingly being regarded as a likely successor.
Sir Keir delivered the keynote address to his party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, in which he urged the British public never to forgive the Conservatives for their mismanagement of the economy in a moment of national crisis and pledged a state-owned energy company under a future Labour government to avoid a repeat of the UK’s present woes.
Attention is now inevitably turning attention towards his partner and his personal life away from the podium.
Sir Keir is married to Lady Victoria Starmer, with whom he has a teenage son, Toby, and a daughter whose name has never been made public, such is the premium the Starmers place on their privacy, very understandably.
Lady Starmer was formerly Victoria Alexander, the daughter of a Polish-Jewish father and a mother who converted to that faith. She was raised in Gospel Oak, north London.
She trained as a solicitor and first met her future husband when he was working as a barrister at Doughty Street chambers in the early 2000s, prior to his appointment as director of public prosecutions.
Recalling their first meeting during his appearance on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2020, Sir Keir remembered: “I was doing a case in court and it all depended on whether the documents were accurate.
“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 duly questioned her about the papers concerned and, just before hanging up, heard her mutter: “Who the f*** does he think he is?”
Despite that inauspicious start, Sir Keir subsequently asked her out on a date to the Lord Stanley pub in Camden, their relationship began and the couple were later married in 2007.
They still live in the borough in a £1.75m townhouse within Mr Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency.
Lady Victoria has since left the legal profession to serve as a governor at her children’s school and to work in occupational health for the NHS.
As Sir Keir told The Jewish Chronicle in an interview in March last year, the family continue to observe the tradition of Friday night dinner and attend London’s Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood, despite his own atheism.
Lady Victoria has gradually made more frequent public appearances at her husband’s side, notably taking part in an 80th anniversary service to remember the Battle of Britain in September 2020 and, a year later, Labour’s previous party conference in Brighton.
“Onlookers praised her quiet confidence and working-mum chic – previously photographed in leather trousers and trainers... with hair shimmery enough to rival the Duchess of Cambridge’s,” recorded one particularly gushing account of that sighting in Tatler.
The Daily Telegraph also took an interest in her at the same point, with a Labour insider telling Camilla Tominey: “She’s quite sassy in that she’s quite unbothered by what he’s doing. If he ever gets into Downing Street, she’s going to be very much leading her own life.
“She’s not going to be in the spotlight like Cherie Blair, but more of a background Sarah Brown type figure.
“They have a great dynamic – she spends quite a lot of time taking the mickey out of him because he can be so serious. I’ve never known her to be particularly political – she’s always had her own interests.”
Lady Victoria has since attended several other events with Sir Keir, including the Euro 2020 Final at Wembley Stadium last July, a candlelit vigil for the murdered Sarah Everard and the Wimbledon women’s singles semi-finals on Centre Court on 7 July this year.
Sporting dark glasses in the Royal Box, Lady Victoria appeared gripped by the match between Ons Jabeur and Tatjana Maria, which just so happened to take place on the very day the Tories had finally succeeded in forcing Boris Johnson’s resignation on what proved to be an operatic day in Westminster, a sweet moment indeed for the Starmers.
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