In shakeup, Sunak appoints ex-prime minister to Cabinet
LONDON — U.K. leader Rishi Sunak on Monday appointed 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.
It is rare for a non-lawmak- er 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 hope that six years as prime minister [and] 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.
He will forever be remembered as the unwitting author of Brexit, a rupture that roiled Britain’s politics, economy and place in the world. Cameron called a 2016 EU membership referendum, confident that the country would vote to stay in the bloc. He resigned the day after voters opted to leave.
Sunak was a strong backer of the winning “leave” side in the referendum, but his decision to appoint Cameron and dismiss Braverman will likely infuriate the Conservative Party’s right wing and inflame tensions in the party that Sunak has sought to soothe. It could win back centrist voters dismayed by the party’s lurch to the right, at risk of losing Brexit-backing, working-class voters who switched support to the Conservatives from Labour during the last national election in 2019.
Sunak had been under growing pressure to fire Braverman — a hard-liner popular with the party’s authoritarian wing — from one of the most senior jobs in government, responsible for handling immigration and policing.
Braverman, a 43-year-old lawyer, has become a leader of the party’s populist wing by advocating ever-tougher curbs on migration and a war on human rights protections, liberal social values and what she has called the “tofu-eating wokerati.” Last month she called migration a “hurricane” heading for Britain and described homelessness as “a lifestyle choice.”
In a highly unusual attack on the police last week, Braverman said London’s police force was ignoring lawbreaking by “pro-Palestinian mobs.” She described demonstrators calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war as “hate-marchers.” She repeated the claims in an article for the Times of London that was not approved in advance by the prime minister’s office, as would usually be the case.
It was the final straw for Sunak, who fired her in a phone call Monday morning.