Keir Starmer is right to keep his wife Victoria out of the spotlight

Very little is known about life at the Starmers’ – but maintaining privacy will become much harder should the family move into No 10, writes John Rentoul

Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Lady Victoria walk hand in hand after his speech at the Labour Party conference in 2022 (AP)

Politicians’ families ought to be off-limits. So when Nick Ferrari, the LBC presenter, asked Keir Starmer why we didn’t see more of Victoria, his wife, on the campaign trail, the Labour leader was entitled to tell him to mind his own business.

He did not, of course, preferring the bland response of saying that “Vic does quite a bit with me”, but that “she’s working at the NHS in a hospital” and “our boy’s been doing his GCSEs – we wanted to create the environment where he could study calmly”.

I rather admire the way Starmer has struck a deal with the devil of media intrusion on his own terms. He will use his wife’s work as an occupational therapist to buttress his pro-NHS credentials, and he will talk about his son and daughter enough to prove that he is a centrist dad; but he has not (yet) asked Victoria to introduce him at Labour Party conference, and he never uses his children’s names in public or allows photographs of them.