LONDON — Rishi Sunak appointed David Cameron as Britain’s new foreign secretary — in a shock comeback for the former prime minister.
Cameron, who resigned as PM in 2016 after losing the Brexit referendum, will become a peer in the House of Lords in order to take on the government role.
The move comes as Sunak carries out a major reshuffle of his government ranks, in a bid to arrest his Conservative Party’s large deficit in opinion polling.
He kicked off the reshuffle Monday by firing Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a key figure on the party’s right. James Cleverly, previously foreign sec, takes over from Braverman at the interior ministry.
Cameron’s dramatic return marks the first post-war example of a former prime minister serving in a successor’s Cabinet since the 1970s, when Conservative Alec Douglas-Home was named foreign secretary in Ted Heath’s government.
Although both are seen as Tory centrists, Sunak and Cameron campaigned on opposite sides of the 2016 Brexit referendum, while Cameron has recently been critical of the prime minister over his decision to axe key parts of the HS2 rail link. The ex-PM’s reputation took a hit amid a lobbying scandal in 2021.
This developing story is being updated.
