Keir Starmer launches government after Labour triumph in UK elections. The PM announces his team after receiving the mandate from King Charles III.
The British Prime Minister has appointed Angela Rayner Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for business reorganization, housing and communities. Rachel Reeves was appointed: Reeves is the UK’s first female chief financial officer.
David Lammy is the new British Foreign Secretary. He was head of diplomacy for the Labour shadow government while they were in opposition. The economist Yvette Cooper is the new Interior Minister. He had been a shadow minister since 2021. Starmer appointed John Healey as defence minister. He replaces Grant Shapp, who was appointed less than a year ago by Rishi Sunak and is among the ministers who lost their seats.
Who is the new prime minister?
Starmer, 61, likes to recall growing up in a working-class family. His father was a factory worker, his mother was a nurse — who later suffered from a rare, serious autoimmune disease — and his family was so staunchly Labour that they named their son after the party’s first Commons leader, Keir Hardie.
Starmer also likes to talk about the terraced house where he grew up in Surrey, a “pebble-dash semi” that “was everything to my family, it gave us stability,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year announcing plans for public housing so that “working people’s aspirations of owning their own home can become a reality.”
As a boy he attended Reigate Grammar School, one of Britain’s top state schools, which became private two years after he entered: Starmer’s fees were paid by the local council until he was 16. After graduating, he was the first in his family to go to university, first at Leeds and then Oxford, becoming a human rights lawyer in 1987, which led to travel to the Caribbean and Africa.
In the late 1990s he defended pro bono the so-called McLibel activists, who had been accused of defamation by McDonald’s for distributing leaflets questioning the fast food corporation’s environmental claims. In 2008 he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, the highest-ranking prosecutor in England and Wales, and in 2014 he was made a baronet, although he rarely uses his title ‘Sir’.
His entry into politics came in 2015 when he was elected MP for a district in North London, when Labour was led by left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn who appointed him shadow secretary for Brexit, which once approved was considered by Starmer, who resigned from his post, “a catastrophic outcome for the United Kingdom, our communities and future generations”.
Starmer has held this belief for years, becoming an advocate for a second referendum to give the British people the chance to confirm the actual deal to leave the EU. However, he has abandoned this position in recent years, making it clear that his Labour government will not seek to backtrack on the exit from the EU or the terms negotiated by Boris Johnson.
After the disastrous 2019 election, in which Labour won its fewest seats since 1935, the maximalist Corbyn stepped down as party leader, and Starmer was elected leader in April 2020, promising to lead the party “into a new era with confidence and hope”. He took a clear reformist turn, aiming to win back lost voters and attract more voters to lead Labour back to victory.
Thanks also to the internal disasters of the Tories, the Labour Party began to lead the polls in October 2021 and since the beginning of 2023 it has had a 20% advantage with which it presents itself in the elections next Thursday. In particular, Starmer, after the humiliating defeat in the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, has concentrated on recovering voters in the so-called Red Wall, the red wall of the historic Labour strongholds of northern England and the Midlands, won by the Tories in the 2019 elections. Yesterday the triumph: 412 seats won, +211 compared to five years ago, and the promise to be “at the service of the country, which we will rebuild brick by brick”.
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