British Prime Minister Keir Starmer named former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as his special envoy on global finance on Saturday, turning to a man credited with shoring up banks during the global financial crisis to help bolster his own support.
Starmer is on the back foot after the Labour Party recorded the worst losses of a governing party in local elections since 1995, prompting a growing number of his own lawmakers to call on him to quit.
Aiming to reset his leadership and win back party support, his office said Labour grandee Brown would be joining Starmer’s team to help advise the prime minister on how global finance can boost Britain’s security and resilience.
Starmer vowed to stay on as leader on Friday as the scale of the election defeat started to emerge.
Labour losses stood at 1,406 seats as the final votes were counted on Saturday, a bigger defeat than the 1,330 seats lost by former Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party in 2019. May quit three weeks later.
(Reuters)
