Ex-leader David Cameron makes shock return to UK government as Sunak rolls the dice with a shakeup
LONDON — With his country mired in economic doldrums and his party trailing in the polls as an election nears, U.K. leader Rishi Sunak rolled the dice and shook up his government on Monday, appointing former Prime Minister David Cameron to the post of foreign secretary.
The move — called bold by Sunak’s supporters and desperate by his critics — came in a Cabinet overhaul that saw Sunak jettison his powerful but controversial interior minister, Home Secretary Suella Braverman, in a bid to reset his faltering government.
The government hailed Cameron’s experience, acquired as U.K. leader between 2010 and 2016, and said Sunak was building “a strong and united team” with a shuffle that tips the government’s balance from the Conservative Party’s hard right to the center.
But Sunak is taking a risk in giving a new political life to the leader responsible for the most divisive issue Britain has faced in years: Brexit.
The Conservatives have been in power for 13 years, but opinion polls for months have put them 15 to 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party amid a stagnating economy, persistently high inflation, an overstretched health care system and a wave of public sector strikes.
Cameron’s appointment surprised seasoned politics-watchers. It’s rare for a non-lawmaker to take a senior government post, and it has been half a century since a former prime minister held a Cabinet job. The government said Cameron had been appointed to Parliament’s unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords, alongside his new job.
“I know it’s not usual for a prime minister to come back in this way,” the now-Lord Cameron acknowledged. “But I believe in public service.”
“I hope that six years as prime minister, 11 years leading the Conservative Party, gives me some useful experience and contacts and relationships and knowledge that I can help the prime minister to make sure we build our alliances, we build partnerships with our friends, we deter our enemies and we keep our country strong,” Cameron, 57, told broadcasters.
Cameron’s foreign policy legacy is mixed. As prime minister, he backed a NATO-led military intervention in Libya in 2011 that toppled Moammar Gadhafi and deepened that country’s chaos. In 2013, he tried and failed to gain Parliament’s backing for U.K. airstrikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria. He also announced a short-lived “golden era” in U.K.-China relations shortly before that relationship soured.
