Politics

Keir Starmer opens up about troubled relationship with father in emotional Piers Morgan interview


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ir Keir Starmer opened up about his troubled relationship with his “difficult” father in an emotional television interview with Piers Morgan.

In an episode of Life Stories on Tuesday, the Labour leader spoke to Piers Morgan about the death of his mother, his strained relationship with his father and his career.

Sir Keir described his father as having a “real difficulty expressing his emotions”, and said he only once told him he was proud, after he passed his 11-plus exams.

“As I was growing up, there was a distance,” he said. “And what I’ve learned from my dad is, obviously a sense of duty, a strong sense of pride and dignity in work.”

He added: “I will be different with my kids.”

In his personal life, Sir Keir has said it was one of his big regrets that his mother could not see him elected as an MP.

Sir Keir’s mother, Josephine, died just two weeks before he was elected for Holborn and St Pancras in 2015, and he described the difficulty she faced living with Still’s disease, an incurable autoimmune condition.

“It’s a disease that attacks your joints,” Sir Keir said.

“For some people it comes and goes. For mum, it came and it came and it came again.”

The illness meant she spent many years in and out of hospital and by 2015 Sir Keir said: “You have to understand, she was so ill by then.

“That was the stage of her life where she’d had her leg amputated. She couldn’t move really. She couldn’t use her hands, she had to be fed, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t communicate.

“And I’d have loved her to have been there, but she was in a terrible way by then, a terrible, terrible place.

“One of my biggest regrets is that our kids never knew her, because by the time they were born, she was incapable of moving, speaking, or being who she was. And she was broken by then.”



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