Sir Keir Starmer has spoken emotionally about his mother Josephine's lifelong battle with Still's disease, a rare form of arthritis that destroys joints. Diagnosed at age 11, she underwent pioneering steroid treatment that allowed her to walk and have four children, despite doctors' predictions she would be unable to walk by her early twenties and never become a mother.
In an interview with Piers Morgan for ITV's Life Stories, the Labour leader revealed the heavy toll the disease and steroids took. 'She got iller and iller, she couldn't use her limbs and she was very prone to infection,' he said. By the end of her life, his mother could not speak or move, and never got to communicate with his two young children.
Starmer recalled a harrowing moment at age 13 or 14 when his father phoned from the hospital saying, 'I don’t think your mum's going to make it. Will you tell the others?' He described it as 'tough' but said the family pulled through. His mother died weeks before he was first elected as MP for Holborn and St Pancras in 2015.
Reflecting on her final years, Starmer said: 'She'd had her leg amputated. She couldn't move, she couldn't use her hands, so she had to be fed. She couldn't speak, couldn't communicate.' He added that one of his 'biggest regrets' was that his children never knew their grandmother.
After his wife's death, Starmer's father Rodney became a recluse. 'When she died, it broke him. She was his whole life,' Starmer said. The interview, which Piers Morgan described as 'one of the most searingly honest and intensely emotional' he had ever done, also touched on how his mother's struggle influenced his commitment to the NHS.
