Keir Starmer opens up over 'distant' relationship with dad Rodney in ITV show

18 January 2024 , 16:05

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Keir Starmer with his parents, Rodney and Josephine

Keir Starmer has said he is striving to have a "different" relationship with his children than he had with his own father.

The Labour leader admitted he regrets not talking to his dad about the distance between them before he died in an ITV Tonight special. Mr Starmer said his toolmaker dad, Rodney, put "all of his emotional energy" into looking after his mum, Josephine, while she was ill.

He told ITV's Keir Starmer: Up Close - Tonight his dad was "quite traditional in that sense" and often worked day and night with little time for his children. Asked if he'd ever talked to him about this, he appeared emotional, saying: “No, no, no. There’s a lot of things I should've done."

Pushed on whether he wished he had, Mr Starmer said: “Yep. But I didn't. I knew I needed to. But when he eventually went downhill, he went downhill quite quickly. And I didn't, I should have done. But out of that I’m determined to have a different relationship with my children."

The Labour leader’s mother Josephine, who worked as an NHS nurse, died just weeks before he was elected to Parliament in 2015. His father passed away three years later in 2018.

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Keir Starmer on holiday in the summer of 1984

The ITV Tonight programme has uncovered previously unseen pictures of Mr Starmer, including one taken on holiday in the summer of 1984 and one as a young lawyer.

Earlier this month, Mr Starmer admitted he worries about the toll of a general election year on his two teenage children. The Labour leader and his wife, Vic, have kept their 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter out of the public eye.

He told Sky News: “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 do 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."

Keir Starmer became a barrister in 1987

During ITV's fly-on-the wall programme Mr Starmer also said he didn’t believe his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn would win the 2019 election — despite serving in his Shadow Cabinet. He said: "I didn't think the Labour Party was in a position to win the last election. I didn't obviously vote for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 or 2016. On the contrary, I resigned."

Mr Starmer, who provoked a backlash last month for praising Margaret Thatcher in a Telegraph article, also said he believes she tore communities apart. In comments that enraged parts of his party, the Labour leader hailed the divisive former Tory PM for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. But in the programme last night, he said: “What she did was a clarity of mission and purpose. But actually what she did was very destructive."

And he insisted he has "no skeletons in the closet" from his time in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service ahead of the election. While he admitted there were "mistakes", the Labour leader said: "If they [the Tories] want to attack me for decisions when I was director of Public Prosecutions, we had 7000 staff, we made nearly a million decisions a year. Will there be mistakes there? Of course there will, but there’ll be no smoking gun, no skeletons in the closet."

Ashley Cowburn