Sir Keir Starmer held back tears as he opened up about his brother’s death in an emotional podcast interview with reality TV star Pete Wicks.
His younger brother Nick Starmer died on Boxing Day last year, aged 60. He had been battling lung cancer.
The Prime Minister was fiercely protective of his brother, who had learning difficulties and was ‘dealt a very different set of cards’ to the Labour leader.
An emotional Sir Keir opened up about his grief, which he said ‘hit him like a bus’, on Pete Wicks’ Man Made podcast, which focuses on modern masculinity and men’s mental health.
The Prime Minister revealed he was by his brother’s side when doctors told him his cancer was terminal – and how Sir Keir had to explain what it meant because he ‘didn’t know that he would property understand’.
He said: ‘Because he’s very vulnerable I didn’t want him to learn about the diagnosis on his own, because I didn’t know that he would properly understand.
‘I didn’t know how he would react, so I insisted on going to the hospital with him to be with him and basically watched his face as he was told that he had terminal cancer.’
The Prime Minister was fiercely protective of his brother Nick
Keir Starmer’s brother Nick died on Boxing Day last year, aged 60
Recorded at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister opens up about his brother’s death to reality TV star Pete Wicks
The Prime Minister added that he wanted to ‘talk through’ the diagnosis with his brother ‘to make sure he properly understood and what the implications of that were going to be in terms of how it would impact on his life.’
During the last two years of Nick’s life, Sir Keir would make regular trips to Leeds to see his sibling in the hospital.
But he refused to speak publicly about his brother’s illness and never tried to exploit it for political gain.
Sir Keir told Pete Wicks he wanted to ‘protect [Nick] above all else’, and so decided to keep his hospital visits a secret.
He said: ‘I decided when he got cancer that I would protect him above all else, therefore I wouldn’t talk about it, apart from with the family.’
To avoid detection, he was secretly smuggled into the hospital’s intensive care unit ‘through back chutes and lifts and staircases’.
‘I sort of popped out of an odd door, spent time with my brother, went back out of the hospital. Nobody knew I’d been there,’ he said.
An emotional Sir Keir revealed he went to visit Nick a week before his death and he knew that it ‘might be the last time that [he] saw him’.
He said: ‘I could see he was in a very bad state and I knew what the diagnosis was, but I was shutting hold out to this. I fiercely wouldn’t let anybody know that this was happening.
‘So 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 that I saw him, but I hadn’t quite processed that.’
‘And then when he did die on Boxing Day, even though for 18 months this was coming, it hit me like a bus – just knocked me out, really hard to take, because he’s my little brother, and I’d seen all he’d been through and how he’d struggled through life.
‘He’d done so much not withstanding the struggle.’
Describing his brother Nick (pictured), Sir Keir said he had ‘an incredible kindness and a willingness to do anything for other people’, despite not having much money.
The Labour leader admitted that following his brother’s death, he has found it hard to find the ‘space’ to mourn, while also serving as Prime Minister.
He said: ‘I’m in the public domain. I’m not trying to be self-regarding, but you have to be out there.
‘People are reading into everything you say or do all sorts of things.
‘This is the hardest thing of my job, when something intensely personal happens and you just need a space.
‘Particularly with grief, in my view. And yet there isn’t really the space. And it’s quite difficult. Very difficult, intensely difficult.’
Describing his brother, Sir Keir said he had ‘an incredible kindness and a willingness to do anything for other people’, despite not having much money.
The Prime Minister admitted that he has ‘never done therapy’, before praising his wife, Vic, describing her as a ‘fantastic absolute rock and brick’.
He added that he was ‘very lucky to have two teenage children who will not let me be Prime Minister’ and ‘will only let me be dad, and who rib me mercilessly and laugh at me constantly’.
‘They’re the first to embarrass me or laugh at me or play me back video clips of what I’ve said or done,’ Sir Keir said.
‘Anything they can do to laugh at or with me, they will do. And it is fantastic. It is exactly how it should be.’
Sir Keir was best man for Nick when he got engaged to his girlfriend. The PM is pictured on the day of his wedding to Victoria with his parents Jo and Rod Starmer
The PM also has two sisters – Anna and Katy (who was Nick’s twin) – and a recent biography of Sir Keir revealed details of the Starmers’ upbringing in Oxted, Surrey.
The book, written by former Labour adviser and journalist Tom Baldwin, described how Nick suffered complications during his birth and his subsequent difficulties with learning.
Sir Keir said: ‘Nick was dealt a very different set of cards to me and he’s had problems all his life — problems I’ve never had to face. I admire him, not in spite of the way his life has taken another course to mine, but because of it.’
He spoke about how his parents instilled in Sir Keir and his sisters the idea you respect people for what they overcome.
‘I remember Dad saying to me many, many times, ‘Nick has achieved as much as you, Keir’, he said.
