Starmer enters race to succeed Corbyn as Labour leader

Bloomberg

The Labour Party’s Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said he’s running to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader following its worst electoral defeat since 1935.
Starmer, 57, is the early front-runner according to a YouGov poll of Labour party members published on January 2. He’s on 36%, comfortably ahead of business spokeswoman Rebecca Long Bailey with Jess Phillips in third.
“I believe another future is possible — but we have to fight for it,” Starmer said on Twitter.
Corbyn said in the aftermath of the crushing defeat to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party on December 12 that he would stand down as leader following a “period of reflection” to determine the direction the party should take.
Labour’s National Executive Committee is due to outline a timetable for the leadership election this week.
Starmer hasn’t always been loyal to the current leader — particularly when it comes to the question of the UK’s relationship with the European Union.
He backed Corbyn’s rivals in the 2015 and 2016 leadership contests and is one of the party’s most vocal Remainers.
“I believe another future is possible. That’s why I’m standing to be leader of the Labour Party,” he said.
While he has been accused of being out of touch with working class Leave voters in northern England, he’s arguably closer to them than Corbyn, who was privately educated.
He told the BBC in December that he’d never been in an office until he left university, because his father worked in a factory and his mother was a nurse.
Starmer has positioned himself as a middle-ground candidate who is neither like Corbyn nor former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, but has also warned the party not to “oversteer” after the election defeat, arguing Labour should “build on”
Corbyn’s anti-austerity message and radical agenda.
Starmer has an impressive legal career behind him, and was knighted for his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions.