Meet UK Labour Party's Keir Mather, the new youngest MP dubbed 'baby of the House'

The 25-year-old, Keir Mather, has become the youngest Labour Party MP in the House of Commons after he flipped the seat for the Labour Party from the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party with a whopping 20,137 majority in the North Yorkshire constituency of Selby and Ainsty. Mather has assumed the title of 'Baby of the House' from a Labour MP colleague Nadia Whittome. 

“We have rewritten the rules on where Labour can win. People have opened their doors to us and embraced our positive vision for the future,” Keir Mather, who has emerged as the youngest Labour MP, said in a statement.

Labour MP noted that the people of Selby and Ainsty have "sent a clear message" to the Conservatives. "For too long, Conservatives up here and in Westminster have failed us, and today that changes. Over the past few months, speaking to hundreds of people on the doorstep, I’ve encountered so much hardship. Hardship made worse by 13 years of negligence and complacency from the Conservatives," he added.

Did Mather's 'generational relatability' lead to his landmark victory? 

Labour’s newest MP Mather, the representative of Generation Z, was born in 1998, the year that Google was founded. He has become the youngest sitting MP in the House of Commons after he clutched a landmark win for Labour in Yorkshire’s Selby and Ainsty in the by-election held on July 20. He, like the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, was named after James Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party who served as the parliamentary leader from 1906 to 1908.

Mather secured the First Class degree in History and Politics from the University of Oxford in 2019 and served as the political leadership scholar at the Blavatnik School of Government, according to the British broadcasters. Mather has won the Selby and Ainsty seat for the Labour for the first time with the highest majority—4,161—that was ever secured by the UK's Opposition party in the by-elections. Analysts say that it could be his ‘generational relatability’ that has led to his landmark victory.

While he is dubbed ‘the baby of the house' or ‘Keir Junior’ by his colleagues, Mather on Thursday joked that he had heard "far worse", during an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp, speaking alongside his mother. When asked, if her son has got what it takes to be the MP, Mather's mother Jill Tambaros said, "Why not? Never say never… he’s 25 and he’s done all of this!’ It’s true."