Who is Keir Starmer’s wife Victoria? As her neighbour, this is what I know...

The Starmers are my neighbours in Kentish Town, writes Eleanor Mills, where Victoria is governor at the local school and with her chic ‘working mum’ vibe is very much part of the local scene. Around these parts, we know ‘Lady Vic’ (as the Labour leader calls her) is very much her own woman and might not even move into No 10

Keir Starmer and Victoria in the Royal Box at the 2022 Wimbledon Championships (PA)

With just days to go before the election, local candidates’ leaflets have been dropping through letterboxes across the country. And where I live in Kentish Town, it has been no different. Apart from, maybe, that our local MP Sir Keir Starmer could be the country’s next prime minister and I can see his house from mine.

It has been quite lively round here recently; what with a noisy week-long protest at the station over the Gaza conflict and piles of children’s shoes placed outside the Labour leader’s house (to remind him of the thousands that have been killed). I regularly spot his security cavalcade if I am up early, whisking Sir Keir off to press the flesh on the campaign trail.

But what most surprised me when I saw the Labour leaflet was the picture of Sir Keir with his wife, Lady Starmer. Or Vic, as she is better known by the Kentish Town mum mafia (who reckon she is “cool”, “a laugh”, “down to earth” and “one of us”).

Around these parts, with her jeans and silk shirts, leather jackets and chic “working mum” vibe, Vic blends in. Downtime for the Starmers means cooking and going to gigs and they are surrounded by great music venues from the Forum to the Jazz Cafe. It is a close-knit community and it’s Vic’s patch. She was born in London and grew up in Gospel Oak, not far from where the couple now have their £1.27m townhouse. In walking distance of the green spaces of Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park and within easy reach of Camden and Soho, it is a busy hub of just-like-them professionals.

As a political spouse, she has been keeping a “low pro” so far. Some say she is just concentrating on helping their son get through his GCSE exams, making him fried eggs and toast, while dutifully cracking on with her job as an occupational therapist in the NHS.

Of course, the incredibly smart, down-to-earth and funny Ms Starmer would undoubtedly help her husband on the doorstep, especially when my Labour contacts say voters still claim they “don’t know who he really is”. Vic has a political pedigree of her own, winning a landslide victory to become student union president at Cardiff University in 1994 when she challenged left-wingers in the NUS and won. The local paper proclaimed “Vic-tory” for the “windswept”, deeply glam then Victoria Alexander.

She is certainly no shrinking violet, either. Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer recounts how the pair met when they were both lawyers. Keir (rumoured to then have been the inspiration for the character Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary) asked to speak to the person who had created some documents he needed for a case.

That phone call was to be his first introduction to Vic’s feisty nature. Before Keir hung up he heard her say to a colleague: “Who the f*** does he think he is?” They met at a legal dinner a few weeks later “and she shared her vegetarian meal with him”. Kentish Town legend has it that they had their first date at my local, The Lord Stanley (an excellent gastro pub if you were wondering). Afterwards, he walked her to the bus stop and waved her off. They married a few years later.

It was Vic who pushed him on in his career to become director of public prosecutions. In a recent Sky interview, the Labour leader said: “My wife was ringing adverts in the papers about well-paid lawyers’ jobs and I said, ‘No I want to serve my country’, which is why, at a late stage, I came into politics…”

Asked if his wife was keen, Sir Keir replied: “No she wasn’t at all, she thought it’d be far better to continue being a lawyer on a reasonable salary and not have all of the challenges you get as a politician.”

Rishi Sunak, Akshata Murty and the Starmers pictured on the day of May’s local elections (Conservative Party/PA)

If he won that battle, it remains to see who will win the war to get to No 10, while the path for wives to help their spouses on their way is well trodden. A two-for-one “Bogof” couples deal is often, depressingly, still what is expected – the D-Day celebrations being a case in point. There was Jill Biden, dutifully trailing behind Joe, and Brigitte doing her best to prop up the fortunes of the terminally unpopular husband Emmanuel. All shadows, of course, of super-spouse Michelle Obama whose power-coupling with husband Barack garnered its own moniker: Mobama.

So far, though, requests for interviews with Lady V from Starmer’s team have been stonewalled. “Ms Starmer will not be giving any interviews” was the curt response when I tried. When I asked whether they might put up some trusted friends to speak for her (as happened when I once wrote a piece about Samantha Cameron, who also “wasn’t available for interview” at the time), I was told firmly that that was not going to happen either.

As one Labour grandee put it to me: “Keir is tough, strategic and proud. He doesn’t want to use his family to humanise his rather robotic public image. He makes a lacklustre candidate but those qualities will make him a very good prime minister.”

And so, until now, we have only had glimpses of Lady Starmer. She was there for the Euro 2020 final at Wembley Stadium, attended a candlelit vigil for Sarah Everard, and was spotted sporting dark glasses in the Royal Box for the Wimbledon women’s singles semi-finals on Centre Court in 2022. Last year, she popped up in a £800 Edeline Lee dress for the Labour conference in Liverpool, which saw her compared to Julianne Moore. But all the signs are that she intends to be a modern wife, letting Sir Keir get on with it while she gets on with her working life.

They also have their two teenage children, aged 13 and 15, to think about. So far, the couple have managed to keep even their names out of the press and new privacy laws have helped. There are rumours that she isn’t keen on the idea of moving to Downing Street and would rather stay in Kentish Town, where both Starmer children attend local schools (she became a governor at our local primary in 2015 when he became the local MP).

By his own admission, the effect his career is having on his children is a concern for Sir Keir: “I want this fight, the only thing which keeps me up at night is our children because they are 13 and 15.

“Those are difficult ages – it will impact them. We don’t name them in public. We don’t take photographs with them and they go to the local school.

“I am desperately trying to protect them in that way, but I know it is going to be hard and I do worry about that.”

The couple at the Labour conference in Liverpool in October last year (AP)

I know a bit about how it might feel, having grown up with my stepmother, Tessa Jowell, who was a fixture in all of Tony Blair’s cabinets. I was used to politicians coming and going in our family home. I’ve seen David Blunkett in his Speedos and Alastair Campbell playing the bagpipes. I’ve even experienced the paparazzi camped outside my house. As a family, you don’t choose a career in politics but it impacts everyone’s lives regardless. Just ask Cherie, who has never lived down answering the door the day after the election in her nightie and was once told that “everyone in the press office hated her”.

I have met most of the incumbents of No 10 and their spouses (except for Mr Truss and Rishi Sunak and his wife). I had a particular soft spot for Samantha Cameron who always behaved with great charm, kindness and dignity, even during the death of her beloved son Ivan. Sarah Brown was a considerable businesswoman in her own right, an excellent PR woman and did much to soften Gordon Brown’s harder edges.

Ironically, one of the most powerful pictures to emerge of his entire reign as leader was the shot of him with Sarah and their two little sons as they left Downing Street. I’ve even dined with Mr May, Theresa’s soulmate and confidante – the two of them were thick as thieves, he being one of her key strategists.

Like Mr May, and Tony Blair’s infamous domestic “kitchen cabinet”, it is said that Lady Starmer is also an important voice in Sir Keir’s ear. It is to her that he turns when he has to make a tough call and Vic who is begged by aides to intervene if it really matters. Her insight into the true state of the NHS proved a good advantage during the leadership debates when Rishi tried to argue that waiting lists for treatments were coming down.

Adding to their anxieties will be the current febrile climate around the Israel/Hamas conflict. Victoria’s family are Jewish, fleeing Poland before the Second World War, and Sir Keir told the Jewish Chronicle they “observe some of the practices such as Friday night prayers”. His wife attends the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. One Labour insider told me Vic had felt “intimidated and scared” by the pro-Palestinian protesters outside their home and she told a court this week how the experience had left her feeling “a bit sick” and “apprehensive and uncomfortable”.

Keir and Victoria are keen to keep their children out of the spotlight (PA Wire)

However, her absence from the campaign trail isn’t, as some have claimed, because of a worry of alienating Muslim-origin voters. Vic has always been reluctant to be Keir’s plus one. Sir Keir has chosen a political career – she, and most importantly, her family – have not. She is quite rightly, simply trying to tread a careful line between supporting her husband when necessary and protecting the privacy of their family.

But it will become more difficult for her to keep out of the public eye should her husband become prime minister. While it is unlikely she will ever do an “Akshata” who took to the stage to deliver a “surprise” gushy speech dedicated to her husband Rishi’s ambition, drive and love for Netflix shows, there will need to be a recalibrating of sorts.

Middle-class life in Kentish Town has much to recommend it; as does the anonymity of not standing out from the crowd. So far Lady Starmer, 51, has managed to do a fantastic job behind the scenes. As Sir Keir told LBC listeners this week, it was his wife who kept his morale up after a disappointing first debate. “I’m not good company when I’m in that place. Vic sort of cheered me up on that one…”

As 4 July hurtles towards us, I fear the Starmers’ cosy Kentish Town vibe is about to change irrevocably. As a prime minister, with great power comes great responsibility and as a husband, Sir Keir will feel responsible to those closest to him, too.

“The biggest concern I have is about the impact it has on my family,” he recently said. As a couple, I wish them the best of luck.