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The PM revealed he visited his brother in secret in the months before he died
Izzie AddisonFriday 21 November 2025 11:50 GMTComments
CloseKeir Starmer pays tribute to ‘wonderful’ brother Nick who died on Boxing Day
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Sir Keir Starmer has revealed the profound personal toll of his brother’s death, saying that the loss “hit me like a bus”.
The prime minister shared the reflections in an interview for The Only Way Is Essex star Pete Wicks’s Man Made podcast.
Recorded at 10 Downing Street to mark Men’s Mental Health Month, Sir Keir described processing the loss as “intensely difficult”.
His brother, Nick Starmer, lived with learning difficulties due to complications at birth.
He died on Boxing Day 2024, aged 60, after being diagnosed with lung cancer about 18 months prior.
“Because he’s 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 said.
open image in galleryNick Starmer died on Boxing Day 2024 (PA Media)He visited his brother while he was in intensive care “unbeknown” to the public, with hospital staff helping him enter and exit unseen, he said.
“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.”
open image in gallerySir Keir Starmer described processing the loss as ‘intensely difficult’ (PA Wire)Sir Keir said the hardest part of being prime minister is when “something intensely personal happens” and there “isn’t the space” to process it.
He also discussed the challenges young men face and identified the difficult search for a role model as the most significant.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Discussing his own relationship with masculinity, the prime minister said fatherhood has 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. (My 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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