Just released 28 minutes ago Victoria Alexander now Mrs Starmer 50 YEARS OLD

[Colemans Left Hook]

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/victoria-starmer-solicitor-keir-wife-first-lady-b1164846.html

NOBODY KNEW HER AGE TIL NOW AND WE DON'T EVEN KNOW THE NAMES OF THEIR CHILDREN
SECRET SQUIRREL STARMER

SCAWSBY NEVER CLICKS ON LINKS SO FOR HIS BENEFIT HER GO'S

LIFESTYLE

Sir Keir Starmer’s wife of 17 years has been largely absent from the campaign trial and isn’t at all keen on moving into No10. From her political roots to their unlikely meeting, Katie Strick charts the life of the Labour leader’s fiercely private other half

KATIE STRICK, SENIOR FEATURE WRITER & EDITOR @KATIE_STRICK
32 MINUTES AGO


Some call it unusual — unsupportive, even: Keir Starmer’s wife’s decision to stay largely out of the limelight in the lead up to the election so far (aside from two rare couples appearances at a Taylor Swift concert and an election rally last month). Others call Victoria Starmer’s low public profile refreshing: a welcome step away from the wife-on-the-campaign-trail trope, where partners are often wheeled out in a bid to boost their husband’s family man image.

“She’s quite sassy in that she’s quite unbothered by what he’s doing,” Labour insiders have said of the former solicitor, 50, who’s been nicknamed a “reluctant First Lady” and has somehow managed to maintain such a private profile that she doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia page (even Liz Truss’ s “quiet”, Philip May-type husband Hugh O’Leary had one). “If [Keir] ever gets into Downing Street, she’s going to be very much leading her own life.”

So what does that life look like, exactly? Working for the NHS, caring for their two teenage children and hosting dinners for their tight circle of friends in Kentish Town, according to those who know Victoria Starmer, most of whom paint a picture of a chic, down-to-earth, quietly confident working mum who can be relied upon to take the mickey out of the Labour leader, 61, when he’s being too serious. “She won’t need a blow-dry every morning or a personal dresser,” say insiders of Victoria — Vic to her husband — on a potential Downing Street move. In fact, the general consensus is that she would rather not leave north London at all.

From her own Labour background to her cutting remark the first time she met Britain’s prospective new PM, here’s what we know about the woman who could be about to step into No10.

The north London schoolgirl who became student union president
Lady Vic, as she is affectionately known amongst Labour staffers, might do her best to steer clear of politics today, but her own political career began years before her husband’s.

She was raised in the affluent north London neighbourhood of Gospel Oak, just a stone’s throw from where she and her husband live now, and had one sister, Judith. Their father Bernard was an economics lecturer turned chartered accountant who was born in Hackney in 1929 as part of a Jewish family who arrived from Poland before the Second World War. Their mother Barbara was a Yorkshire-born community doctor who became a popular London GP and later converted to Judaism.

VICKY ALEXANDER, AS SHE WAS KNOWN BY THEN, WAS CARDIFF UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT UNION PRESIDENT IN 1995
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Growing up, Victoria Starmer — then Victoria Alexander and known by the nickname Vicky — attended Gospel Oak Primary School and later the £26,500-a-year, all-girls Channing School in Highgate, north London, before going on to study law and sociology at Cardiff University — the place her own political career began. As the university’s education and welfare officer in 1993, she fought against reforms proposed by then-Tory education secretary John Patten, such as ending ‘closed shop’ unions and cuts to funding for political activities — battles that helped her to win a landslide victory to become student union president the following year, a post-graduate role that former Labour leader Neil Kinnock had held 30 years previously.

“The three words on my ballot were ‘Make My Day’. Thank you Cardiff for doing it,” a then-21-year-old Vicky reportedly said after her win by 1,153 votes, a majority of 528 over her closest rival. Reporters for the student newspaper gushed about her “windswept look” and “f***ing corny, f***ing excellent” reaction to her victory at the time.

RECENTLY-EMERGED PICTURES OF VICTORIA STARMER (LEFT) DOING KARAOKE AT CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
“Vicky Alexander’s ‘windswept’ look must have played its part in her massive majority”, said the paper, but her “excellent manifesto did swing the electorate and proved she was a winner”. The role earned her the equivalent of £22,000 a year in today’s money and saw her responsible for a £5.3m budget. “Sharp-suited Vicky is a far cry from the image of a scruffy subversive as she bustles between meetings with college officials and accountants,” said a profile in the Wales on Sunday newspaper, while Rob Watkins — then picture editor of the university’s student newspaper — remembers her as an impressive and popular campaigner known for always being armed with a walkie-talkie.

“She was a strong campaigner. I remember her taking the role very seriously. But she was also funny and confident and very good with people,” he says. “She was clearly very popular because she won more than two-thirds of the votes both times she was elected. You could tell that she cared a lot about what she did and the situation people found themselves in at university. She’d always be running around with a walkie-talkie at union events.”

After her year as union president, she returned to her hometown of London and became a volunteer for Tony Blair’s campaign HQ. She went onto qualify as a solicitor four years later, in 2001, and worked for Hodge Jones & Allen, a Soho law firm specialising in street crime. Insiders say she was known as an ambitious young lawyer with “eerily perfect hair and a slightly nasal voice” and that she’d often spend the early hours meeting clients in police stations.

An unromantic meet-cute that turned into a 17-year marriage
“Who the f*** does he think he is?”

These were the first words Victoria supposedly uttered after meeting her now-husband Keir Starmer for the first time. It was the early 2000s, before his appointment as director of public prosecutions. She was a solicitor and he was a senior barrister with Doughty Street Chambers and he’d just called her to discuss some documents for a court case. She found his obsessive fact-checking irritating, according to the Labour leader, who recounted his meeting with his wife on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2020.

“I was doing a case in court and it all depended on whether the documents were accurate,” he told Morgan. “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 went onto question her about the papers apparently heard her mutter “Who the f*** does he think he is?” before hanging up the line.

It was an unlikely start for Britain’s prospective First Couple. But love blossomed. They found themselves placed next to each other at a legal dinner a few weeks later and Vic shared her vegetarian meal with him (he’d been given meat, despite being pescatarian). He persuaded her to go on a date with him to the Lord Stanley pub in Camden — now their local, and since deemed by their son to be the least romantic location he could imagine — and walked her to the bus stop afterwards. They quickly became an item. “You might think ‘not the best of starts,’ but it was absolutely classic Vic. Very sassy, very down-to-earth, no nonsense from anyone, including from me,” Keir has said of that now-notorious first phone call with his wife.

Their engagement — on a holiday to Santorini in Greece in 2004, just a few months after meeting — gives another insight into Vic’s no-nonsense attitude. “Won’t we need a ring, Keir?” she reportedly replied when tried to propose spontaneously.

The couple married three years later, on May 6, 2007, at a Georgian manor house on the Fennes Estate in Essex, with four best men present and Victoria walking into the wedding to the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The honeymoon on Italy’s Amalfi Coast was “the most romantic getaway”, according to Keir, who has since recounted how he lost his wedding ring on the trip and had to rummage through a bin of paper hand towels to retrieve it. Their son, 16, was born a year later, and two years later they had a daughter, 13.

After 17 years of marriage, the Labour leader says their love “gets stronger every day”. “Love and Vic are two sides of the same coin,” he said in an interview about their love story last month. “It sounds naff, but we’re made for each other... She makes me complete, who I really am... And we laugh a lot. Usually about all sorts of daft things the kids say.”

From ambitious solicitor to pillar of her north London postcode
Since stepping down from her job as a solicitor, Victoria has taken up two new roles: serving as a governor at her children’s school, and working in occupational health for the NHS in Camden — a job she reportedly loves and plans to continue even if her husband becomes PM. “I get a direct line of sight on a daily basis into the challenges of the NHS and the morale of the staff”, he has said of her job in the past. “She loves working for the NHS. She loves the team that she's working with.”

[IDM]

and your point is.????