New PM Keir Starmer Names Top Team After Vowing To ‘Rebuild’ UK

World reaction

The results buck a trend among Britain’s closest Western allies, with the far-right in France eyeing power and Donald Trump looking set for a return in the United States.

Congratulations came in from European leaders, including Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said Starmer would be a “very good, very successful” prime minister.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the two countries would “continue to be reliable allies through thick and thin”.

Ex-US president Donald Trump congratulated his admirer Farage on winning election to the UK parliament at his eighth attempt, but noticeably neglected to mention Starmer.

Outside London’s busy Waterloo station, 49-year-old engagement officer Ramsey Sargent called it a “momentous election”.

“It has been very rocky over the last few months and years. I’m really excited to see what happens next,” he told AFP.

‘Catastrophic’

Sunak tendered his resignation to the king shortly after returning to London from his rural constituency in northern England, where the depth of his party’s defeat quickly became apparent.

The Tories’ worst previous election result was 156 seats in 1906. Former leader William Hague told Times Radio this was “a catastrophic result in historic terms”.

But Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said it was “not as catastrophic as some were predicting” and the Tories would now need to decide how best to fight back.

Brexit champion Farage has made no secret of his aim to take over the party.

“There is a massive gap on the centre-right of British politics and my job is to fill it,” he said after a comfortable win in Clacton, eastern England.

To-do list

Labour’s resurgence is a stunning turnaround from five years ago, when hard-left former leader Jeremy Corbyn took the party to its worst defeat since 1935 in an election dominated by Brexit.

Starmer took over in early 2020 and set about moving the party back to the centre, purging the infighting and anti-Semitism that cost it support.

Opinion polls consistently put Labour 20 points ahead of the Tories since Truss’s resignation, giving an air of inevitability about a Labour win — the first since Tony Blair in 2005.

But as the count neared the end, the gap was around 11 percent, with Labour looking set to win fewer votes than it did in 2019, partly reflecting a lower turnout.

Starmer faces a daunting in-tray, from anaemic economic growth to overstretched and underfunded public services and households squeezed financially.

He has promised a return of political integrity, after a chaotic period of five Tory prime ministers in 14 years, scandal and sleaze.

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