New British Prime Minister Keir Starmer doesn’t get to take a breather
New British Prime Minister Keir Starmer doesn’t get to take a breather. After a draining six-week election campaign, the center-left politician must get straight to work assembling his government, tackling a mountain of domestic problems and putting his stamp on the U.K.’s relations with the rest of the world.
It’s a daunting list for a new leader who has never served in, much less led, a government. But Starmer, who was officially appointed prime minister Friday, insisted that he is up to the challenge of heading the U.K. in a world that is “a more volatile place” than it has been for many years.
Like someone moving into a new home with their IKEA furniture, Starmer’s first task was to assemble a Cabinet.
Starmer began putting together his government soon after he walked through the door of 10 Downing St. on Friday afternoon following his landslide election victory. He has a plethora of lawmakers to choose from – his Labour Party won more than 400 seats in Thursday’s election, almost two-thirds of the 650 in the House of Commons.
Key players in the new administration include Treasury chief Rachel Reeves – a former Bank of England economist and the first woman to hold that job – who will liaise with international financial institutions.
The new foreign secretary, Britain’s top diplomat, is David Lammy, a Harvard Law School graduate who vowed to “reconnect Britain for our security and prosperity at home.”
Starmer has said his message to the world from the U.K. is: “We’re back.” He wants Britain to take a larger role on the global stage after years of soured relations with Europe over Brexit and the inward-looking U.K. political soap opera that followed.
He takes office at a time of multiple crises — including the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, a surging far right, a muscle-flexing China — that will test the cool head he honed in his former job as Britain’s chief prosecutor.
