The New Labour background of Victoria Alexander - wife of Keir Starmer

Last updated 27 May 2025

Last month I wrote about the Jewish background of Keir Starmer’s wife, Victoria Alexander, and the silence about her relatives in Tel Aviv.

But another question which has not been asked is: Why did she leave her career in law to become an “occupational health worker in the NHS”? And is this linked to the question of why Victoria remains “in the shadows”?

While Keir Starmer’s family background is certainly not working class, Victoria Alexander is even more of a champagne socialist.

“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 attended the £26,500-a-year all-girls Channing School in Highgate…. Vic’s sporting passion… is horse-racing. Her mother was born and raised in Doncaster and her grandmother lived on the edge of the racecourse. ‘Vic’s mum had horseracing in her blood and Vic loves it, too,’ Keir said recently.”

Today Victoria Starmer is known for “hosting regular dinners for their tight circle of North London friends and joking that although her husband thinks it’s his constituency, it’s actually hers, according to Keir’s biographer Tom Baldwin.”

Victoria Alexander’s political career began years before her husband’s. While studying law and sociology at Cardiff University she became the university’s education and welfare officer in 1993 and from 1994-5 was the elected student union president, a post-graduate role with a salary equivalent to £22,000 a year in today’s money and responsible for a £5.3m budget.

Alexander then returned to London and became a volunteer for Tony Blair’s campaign HQ.

In 2001 she qualified as a solicitor and was known as an ambitious young lawyer. In the early to mid 2000s she worked at Hodge Jones & Allen, founded by Henry Hodge who, together with his wife Margaret Hodge and Peter Mandelson, were instrumental in the creation of New Labour as a Third Way party. The Hodges were not only close friends of the Blairs but also their next-door neighbours, having persuaded them to move to their street in Islington in the 1990s.

Henry Hodge’s wife (now widow) Margaret Hodge (née Oppenheimer) was one of the most prominent Labour MPs in the campaign to bring down the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn with an “antisemitism” scam. In 2018, after her notoriously vicious verbal assault in the House of Commons, she was rightly condemned by Norman Finkelstein: “Dame Hodge - you haven't a clue what you're talking about'.

Margaret Oppenheimer was born in 1944 in Alexandria, Egypt. Her Jewish parents had indeed left Germany and Austria in the 1930s, but their decision to leave Egypt in 1948 had nothing to do with Hitler. Hostility to Jews in the Middle East was consequent on the recent Nakba - “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.”

In 2018 when Norman Finkelstein told Dame Hodge to pack her bags and leave the Labour Party, she was a Dame as the wife of her benighted husband. But in the August 2024 Dissolution Honours she was nominated by Keir Starmer as a Dame in her own right and now sits in the House of Lords.

Postscript 27 May 2025

In the 2010 film The Ghost by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski (based on Harris’ 2007 book) the narrative concludes with the revelation that the wife of the former Prime Minister (Blair) was a CIA agent.

I certainly do not presume to make any such assertion, for which there is no evidence.

But let’s look at the time line.

After becoming a barrister in 1987, Starmer “mostly dealt with criminal defence work on human rights matters.”

In 2007 he married Victoria Alexander.

In 2008 he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions. After stepping down in 2013 he accepted a knighthood in January 2014. At the General Election in May 2015 he became Labour MP for the safe seat of Holborn and St Pancras with a majority of 17,048 (52.9%). After Ed Miliband resigned Starmer supported Andy Burnham (NOT Jeremy Corbyn) in the leadership election.

In the run-up to the Brexit debate from 2015-2016 Starmer was a strong supporter of Remain.

In September 2015 Starmer was appointed to Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Home Office Minister.

After the June 2016 EU Referendum vote, Starmer was one of two dozen Shadow Cabinet members who resigned and one of the 172 Labour MPs who supported a no-confidence vote against Corbyn, with only 40 supporting him.

So in 2016 Corbyn had minimal support among Labour MPs. He remained as Leader for the same reason he had been elected in 2015 - new voting rules had passed power to ordinary party members. In September 2016 “Corbyn won the election with 313,209 votes, increasing his share of the vote from 59.5% to 61.8% compared with the result of the 2015 leadership election and receiving some 62,000 more votes than in 2015.”

Although Starmer was a strong Remainer and had voted to remove Corbyn, he was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.

The 2017 General Election was called in another attempt to crush the Labour Party in parliament and remove Corbyn as Leader. But he proved popular not only with Party Members but in the country and Teresa May lost her majority. Starmer was re-elected with an increased majority of 30,509 (70.1%).

In November 2017 Starmer posted publicly about his participation in a “lively discussion” at the Trilateral Commission.

Before the 2019 general election Starmer - without approval from Corbyn - announced on stage that a Labour Government would hold a second Brexit Referendum with Rejoin on the Ballot Paper, thus losing the Red Wall at a stroke. In spite of this, Starmer would later blame Corbyn for Labour’s defeat and expel him from the Party.

In 2019 Starmer was re-elected in Holborn but with a reduced majority of 27,763 (64.9%). And at the 2024 General Election Starmer’s Holborn majority was further reduced to 18,884 (48.9%).