How the future Lady Starmer - armed with her trusty walkie talkie - secured her own landslide election victories at Cardiff University Students' Union (and she could probably teach her husband a thing or two...)

As any would-be prime minister knows, there’s nothing like a political spouse to liven up your image and make you appear more human to the electorate.

Akshata Murty enlightened last year’s Conservative conference in Manchester with revelations that her husband Rishi ‘does love a good rom-com – the cheesier the better’.

Samantha Cameron once helpfully revealed that ‘Dave’ was ‘not very good at picking up his clothes’ and ‘a terrible channel flicker’. Gordon Brown was ‘messy’, ‘noisy’ and ‘no saint’, according to his wife Sarah.

Even notoriously shy Philip May agreed to go on BBC’s The One Show in an attempt to soften his wife Theresa’s ‘robot’ image with endearing anecdotes about being allowed only ‘a little section’ of their bedroom wardrobe and being made to take out the bins.

Who knows, then, what insights Victoria Starmer could give into her Labour leader husband, a man who, those on the Right and Left of the spectrum generally agree, could do with a boost in the charisma department.

Alas, while 61-year-old workhorse Sir Keir has been diligently trundling along the campaign trail in his bid to become Britain’s next PM, the woman many believe could be the most powerful weapon in his political armoury has been missing completely.

The 50-year-old mother-of-two didn’t even put in an appearance when Sir Keir launched his manifesto in Manchester last week.

He was supported, instead, by the other right-hand woman in his life – his deputy Angela Rayner.

And while Rishi Sunak’s wife was canvassing in Cambridgeshire on Wednesday, all requests for interviews with Lady Vic, as she is affectionately known within Labour circles, have been batted away.

Off the campaign trail, though, it is a different matter as Victoria was beaming in a picture her husband posted to Twitter/X on Friday of their night at singer Taylor Swift’s Wembley concert. The Labour leader captioned the photograph: ‘ “Swift” campaign pitstop.’

The official reason for Victoria’s absence from the election battlefield, however? Her work as an NHS occupational therapist, combined with the demands of raising the Starmers’ teenage son and daughter.

As Sir Keir put it, when asked about his wife’s whereabouts on Tuesday: ‘One, she is working at the NHS in a hospital. Two, our boy has been doing his GCSEs.’

But former solicitor Lady Starmer hasn’t always shied away from the political limelight.

If her days as a leading light in Cardiff University Students’ Union are anything to go by, she could probably even teach her husband of 17 years a thing or two about electoral success.

Turn back the clock 30 years and law undergraduate Victoria (known better as Vicky) Alexander was a fearless presence at students’ union hustings addressing hundreds of her peers on hot topics of the day, such as the freezing of grants, the introduction of loans and student hardship.

Twice she swept to victory with massive majorities – first in 1993, when she was elected welfare officer, and again, a year later, when she secured a post-graduate sabbatical as president of Cardiff University Students’ Union. Candid photographs of her celebrating her win emerged last week – as did snaps of her counting the vote and singing at a karaoke night – courtesy of Rob Watkins, picture editor of the university’s student newspaper, now living in Finland, who only recently realised the significance of the negatives he still kept from his student days.

Victoria took up the presidency in 1995, after finishing her degree, on an £11,000 salary. At just 21 she was responsible for a £5.3 million budget and handled profits from the student union’s two nightclubs, travel agents, restaurants, bars and a shopping mall.

A profile of her in the Wales on Sunday newspaper stated: ‘Sharp-suited Vicky is a far cry from the image of a scruffy subversive as she bustles between meetings with college officials and accountants.’

She said at the time: ‘The average student finds politics a turn-off, so it’s very important how you present it’ – a message which, three decades on, her husband would do well to heed.

Defending her reputation as a moderate Labour supporter at a time when John Major was PM, she said: ‘We still want to change the world and I wouldn’t mind getting rid of this government, but we are a bit more practical now.’

‘She was very impressive,’ says Rob Watkins, who has only positive memories of her. ‘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.’

In 1993, when Victoria was still welfare officer, she was interviewed by Wales on Sunday for a financial guide for freshers, and suggested students take a ‘quiet sit down and a cup of tea’ before considering their finances.

‘Draw up a list of what your income is and what your outgoings are likely to be, and draw up a budget plan,’ she said. ‘If you’re not disciplined you can find yourself in trouble very quickly.’

The following month she spoke to the South Wales Echo to express concern that safe-sex messages had not got through, after a survey revealed that more than half of male students at Cardiff claimed they had sex on first dates.

Describing the statistics as ‘alarming’, she also countered that bravado might have tainted some responses to the questionnaire.

‘People sit around filling them in with their mates – it might not be that accurate,’ she admitted.

Victoria’s tenure as president, however, was not without controversy – an experience she could draw on when offering advice to Sir Keir. In January 1995 she was accused by Student Union council members of acting unconstitutionally when they claim she tried to rush through proposed structural changes to the council. She later issued a presidential decree ordering the postponement of union elections.

In May that year a fellow council member, who claimed she had ‘ridden rough-shod’ over them, demanded she be disciplined for holding the committee in contempt and for ‘conduct detrimental to the good standing of the union’. But these claims did not lead to any disciplinary procedure.

Not that this kerfuffle put her off politics. By 1997 she had returned to London (where she was born in 1973) and was a volunteer at Tony Blair’s campaign HQ.

But Victoria had her heart set on being a lawyer. She qualified as a solicitor in 2001 and worked for the London firm Hodge Jones & Allen.

Her mother Barbara, who died after a fall in February 2020, was a popular North London GP who grew up in Doncaster and passed her love of horse racing on to Victoria and her older sister Judith, a primary school teacher.

Her father Bernard, an economics lecturer who became a chartered accountant, was born in Hackney in 1929.

By then his Jewish family, who came to Britain from Poland before the Second World War, had changed their name from Zolkind to Alexander.

She went to £26,500-a-year Channing School for Girls, in north London, which is now among thousands of private schools set to be hit by her husband’s threat to charge VAT on fees. She met senior barrister Keir in 2005 when she prepared case files for him. After asking twice if she was ‘certain’ they were correct, he overheard her muttering to a colleague as she put the phone down: ‘Who the f*** does he think he is?’

A few weeks later vegetarian Victoria sat next to pescatarian Keir at a legal dinner, where he was served meat. They arranged their first date at The Lord Stanley pub in Camden.

By then Keir had several serious relationships behind him, including one which saw him buy a house with human rights barrister Phillippa Kaufmann.

With Victoria, however, he had found someone, as he later put it, ‘grounded, sassy, funny, street-wise – and utterly gorgeous too’.

He proposed spontaneously on holiday in Santorini in Greece. Her response was: ‘Won’t we need a ring?’ They married in 2007 and live in the four-bedroom terraced house Sir Keir bought for £650,000 in 2004 and which is now worth close to £2 million.

By all accounts the couple are blissfully happy. ‘Love and Vic are two sides of the same coin,’ he told The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine last week. ‘It sounds naff but we’re made for each other. If anything our love gets stronger every day. She makes me complete, who I really am.’

Victoria is said to be reluctant to disrupt the family’s life in leafy north London if her husband wins the election, and has no intention of giving up her job.

But she has already had a bitter taste of life as a high-profile politician’s wife.

Last week she told Westminster magistrates she felt ‘sick’ after returning with her son in April to find two pro-Palestine protesters outside the family home, who were later charged with public order offences. It remains to be seen if this experience is enough to convince her that the family must up sticks for the security of Downing Street.

Mr Watkins is in no doubt she will rise to the occasion.

He says: ‘If she becomes the Prime Minister’s wife, she won’t seek out the limelight but she’ll know the drill and just get on with it.’