Keir Starmer is set to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Keir Starmer is almost certain to become Britain’s next prime minister after an exit poll predicted his Labour Party would win a majority. Parliamentary elections were overwhelming on Thursday.

The exit poll, which has accurately predicted the winner of the last five British general elections, suggested on Thursday night that Labour was on course to win a commanding majority of seats in the House of Commons, meaning Mr Starmer would replace Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took office less than two years ago.

Mr Starmer, a 61-year-old former human rights lawyer, has engineered a remarkable turnaround for the Labour Party, which just a few years ago suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s. He has moved the party to the political centre, capitalising on the failings of three Conservative prime ministers.

“He’s wild — some would say boring — boring in his field,” Jill Rutter, a fellow at the London-based research group UK in a Changing Europe, recently told The New York Times. “He’s not going to set any pulses racing, but he does look relatively prime ministerial.”

Mr Starmer grew up in a left-wing working-class family in Surrey, outside London. He did not have a close relationship with his father; his mother, a nurse, suffered from a debilitating illness that took her in and out of hospital. Mr Starmer became the first in his family to graduate, first from the University of Leeds and then from Oxford to study law.

He is named after Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist who was the first leader of the Labour Party. As a young barrister he represented protesters accused of libel by fast food chain McDonald’s, and later rose to become Britain’s chief prosecutor and was knighted.

He was elected to parliament in 2015 and succeeded left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour in 2020. He began to reshape the party, dropping Corbyn’s proposal to nationalise Britain’s energy companies and promising not to raise taxes on working families. He also pledged to support the British military, hoping to end the anti-patriotic label Labour had had during the Corbyn era.

Mr Starmer has also stamped out the anti-Semitism that infected the party’s ranks under Mr Corbyn. Although he has made no connection between that and his personal life, his wife, Victoria Starmer, comes from a Jewish family in London.