LONDON (AP) – For someone often derided as dull, Keir Starmer has delivered a sensational election result.

Starmer has led Britain’s Labour Party to a landslide election victory, and became prime minister – the first leader from the centre-left party to win a United Kingdom (UK) national election since Tony Blair, who won three in a row starting in 1997.

It’s the latest reinvention for a man who went from human rights attorney to hard-nosed prosecutor and from young radical to middle-aged pragmatist.

Like Blair, who refashioned the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s, 61-year-old Starmer led Labour to victory over Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in Thursday’s election after dragging the party towards the political middle ground.

He won by promising voters change, but also calm, vowing to restore stability to public life and give Britain “the sunlight of hope” after 14 years of turmoil under the Conservatives.

“People look at Starmer and they see this guy who is very solid, clearly very able in his professional life,” said author of How Labour Wins (and Why it Loses) Douglas Beattie.

“I think people want that caution, they want that stability.” A former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, Starmer has often been caricatured by Conservative opponents as a “lefty London lawyer”. He was knighted for his role leading the Crown Prosecution Service, and opponents like to use his title, Sir Keir Starmer, to paint him as elite and out of touch.

Starmer prefers to stress his humble roots and everyman tastes. He loves football – still plays the sport on weekends – and enjoys nothing more than watching Premier League team Arsenal. He and his wife Victoria, who works in occupational health, have two teenage children they strive to keep out of the public eye. During the campaign he was stubbornly resistant to revealing flashes of personality, telling a Guardian interviewer that he couldn’t remember any of his dreams, did not have a favourite novel and had no childhood fears.

When he did get personal, telling a journalist that he hopes to carve out Friday evenings to spend with his family, and Friday night dinners are a family tradition – the Conservatives used it against him, claiming Starmer planned to be a part-time prime minister.

Born in 1963, Starmer is the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who named him after Keir Hardie, the Labour Party’s first leader. One of four children, he was raised in a cash-strapped household in a small town outside London.

“There were hard times,” he said in a speech launching his election campaign. “I know what out-of-control inflation feels like, how the rising cost of living can make you scared of the postman coming down the path: ‘Will he bring another bill we can’t afford?’”

Starmer’s mother suffered from a chronic illness, Still’s disease, that left her in pain, and Starmer has said that visiting her in the hospital and helping to care for her helped form his strong support for the state-funded National Health Service.

He was the first member of his family to go to college, studying law at Leeds University and Oxford. As a lawyer, he took civil liberties cases including that of the “McLibel Two”, green activists sued by McDonald’s for handing out leaflets saying the restaurant chain sold unhealthy food.

The cases often put him at odds with both Conservative and Labour governments, so his switch to become head of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008 surprised some colleagues.

But during five years in the job he gained a reputation as a tough and hard-working director of public prosecutions.

Starmer entered politics relatively late, in his 50s, and was elected to Parliament in 2015. He often disagreed with party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a staunch socialist, at one point quitting the party’s top team over disagreements, but agreed to serve as Labour’s Brexit spokesman under Corbyn.

Starmer has faced repeated questions about that decision, and about urging voters to support Corbyn, a divisive figure under whose leadership the party was hammered in the 2019 election. He said he wanted to stay and fight to change Labour, arguing that “leaders are temporary, but political parties are permanent”.

After Corbyn led Labour to election defeats in 2017 and 2019 – the latter the party’s worst result since 1935 – Labour picked Starmer to lead efforts to rebuild.

His leadership has coincided with a turbulent period that saw Britain suffer through the COVID-19 pandemic, leave the European Union (EU), absorb the economic shock of the Ukraine conflict and endure economic turmoil from Liz Truss’ turbulent 49-day term as prime minister in 2022.

Voters are weary from a cost-of-living crisis, a wave of public sector strikes and political turmoil that saw the Conservative Party dispatch two prime ministers within weeks in 2022 – Boris Johnson and Truss – before installing Sunak to try to steady the ship.

Starmer promised “a culture change in the Labour Party”. His mantra is now “country before party”.

Starmer has promised voters that a Labour government can ease Britain’s chronic housing crisis and repair its fraying public services, especially the creaking health service – but without imposing tax increases or deepening the public debt.

“While I don’t think anyone is particularly excited about Keir Starmer, I think he has done a good job of situating himself to bring government back to where it belongs,” said senior lecturer in modern history at City University of London Lise Butler.

ÉGHEZÉE, BELGIUM (AFP) – Cedric Petit’s drone hummed above a Belgian field. He spotted a white dot on the control screen: a tiny fawn nestled in the tall grasses – soon to be rescued from a grisly end.

Four years ago, the 40-year-old wildlife lover founded a group with a simple mission: “Saving Bambi” helps farmers avoid the nasty surprise of finding a tiny mammal or nesting bird ground up by their machinery.

Called in before the harvest, usually last-minute and working for free, Petit and his fellow volunteers use drones equipped with heat-sensitive cameras to locate at-risk animals and move them to the safety of woods nearby.

“Accidents are happening more and more often – that’s why we’re here,” said Petit, tramping through a field of alfalfa, an animal feed crop, after a dawn rescue in Eghezee in central Belgium.

“Because of unpredictable weather linked to climate change, crops are growing all year round, and harvesting is coming earlier and earlier, including between late April and late June, which is the birthing period for fawns,” said Petit, who grew up in a family of farmers.

Operating across Belgium and neighbouring Luxembourg, his association said it rescued 834 fawns last year – up from 353 the previous year.

Its work is modelled on the example of Germany and Switzerland, where larger networks of volunteers carry out thousands of rescues every year across huge areas of farmland.

Petit’s growing Belgian operation has around 80 drone pilots who freely devote their time during the most critical six weeks of the year – like him, they work around their day jobs.

To get a good wide view of a field, pilots fly their drones at a height of around 70 metres – taking the time needed to spot a fawn curled at ground level. Barely weeks old, the animals’ spindly legs are still too frail to carry their own weight, making them entirely vulnerable to the blades of a giant mower.

On that morning in Eghezee, the drone sensor first spotted a hare enjoying a morning feast of alfalfa, then a young male roe deer taking a dawn stroll through the cool grasses.

At last Petit spotted a sleeping fawn, curled in a little ball.

He drew near, with gloves and a small crate covered in hay, to relocate the animal as gently as he can.

“This little guy is one-and-a-half, maybe two weeks old,” said Petit. “Now we need to move him to safety at the edge of the woods, where his mother can find him.”

Most rescues involve roe deer fawns, whose mothers move them from the woods into the fields after birth so they can bathe in sunlight in their crucial first days of life.

“Deer fawns are rarer – they’re tougher, like foals, and can keep up with their mothers pretty soon after birth,” Petit explained.

Beyond the animal welfare argument, “Saving Bambi” also helps ward off botulism poisoning for livestock – a risk were they to feed from bales of hay contaminated by animal carcasses.

“That’s a big problem that is best avoided,” summed up Bernard Debouche, the farmer who called Petit out on his latest early-morning mission.

Before knowing about the tracking system, Debouche would find the remains of a baby animal caught in the blades after mowing his fields – a “very unpleasant experience”, he recalled.

“We used to go blindly ahead, and sometimes we just couldn’t see them – they are so tiny we would just roll over them,” he said.

“And no one wants to see a young fawn crushed by a mower.”