LONDON (AP) — 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 came in a Cabinet overhaul that saw Sunak jettison his powerful but controversial interior minister, Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
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.
The government hailed Cameron’s experience, acquired as U.K. leader between 2010 and 2016.
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 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.
As prime minister, Cameron 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.
