Keir Starmer becomes emotional over his brother’s death on podcast with Pete Wicks

Sir Keir Starmer has recalled how the death of his brother hit him ‘like a bus’ in an emotional podcast interview.

The Prime Minister lost his brother Nick Starmer, 60, on Boxing Day last year, 18 months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Sir Keir said he was with his younger brother, who had learning difficulties due to complications at birth, when Nick was told his condition was terminal.

Speaking to Pete Wicks on Wicks’ podcast, Man Made, he said: ‘Because (my brother was) very vulnerable, I didn’t want him to learn about the diagnosis on his own, and because I didn’t know that he would properly understand and I didn’t know how he would react, I insisted on going to the hospital with him and basically watched his face as he was told he had terminal cancer.’

Sir Keir, who becomes tearful, said he visited his brother while he was in intensive care ‘unbeknown’ to the public, with hospital staff helping him enter and exit undetected.

‘I was shutting the world out to this,’ he said. ‘I fiercely wouldn’t let anybody know that this was happening.

‘I knew he was going to die, and I probably in my heart of heart knew when I saw him just before Christmas that that might be the last time I saw him, but I hadn’t quite processed that.

‘Then when he did die on Boxing Day, even though for 18 months I’d known that this was coming, it hit me like a bus. Just knocked me out.

‘(It was) really hard to take because he’s my little brother.’

Sir Keir said the most difficult part of being Prime Minister is when ‘something intensely personal happens’ and there ‘isn’t the space’ to process it.

The interview, recorded at 10 Downing Street, was part of Men’s Mental Health Month.

During the podcast, Sir Keir spoke of the challenges young men face and said the search for a role model was a particular problem.

He said: ‘People like Andrew Tate and that sort of person become quite attractive to young men, because they search for a role and on one level that gives them a sense of being successful, rich and famous.

‘On the other hand, it comes with a whole baggage of misogyny and toxic division that goes with it. Steering young men away from that path on to a different path is quite tricky.’

The Prime Minister spoke about his own relationship with masculinity, reflecting that being a father made him a better man.

Sir Keir – who has a son and daughter with wife Lady Victoria – said he ‘put a lot of thought’ into parenting in a different way from his ‘distant’ father.

He said: ‘(Fatherhood) created space for me to be something different. They (his children) changed my life profoundly, they changed me as a person, me as a man, my sense of what it is to be a man.’

Asked what he hopes his children would say about him, Sir Keir replied: ‘What I’d like them to say is that I was a loving dad. That is all.’

The podcast episode, released on Friday, follows the publication of the Government’s strategy for men’s health which aims to tackle issues such as suicide, alcohol abuse and problem gambling.

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