UK PM appoints advisers after local election losses

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday appointed two veteran leaders in expert advisory roles at Downing Street after a disastrous local election for the governing Labour Party.

Former British prime minister and chancellor Gordon Brown was named Special Envoy on Global Finance and Cooperation and former party leader and Cabinet minister Harriet Harman as Adviser on Women and Girls.

The appointment of two senior party grandees came a day after Labour’s worst local election performance, losing hundreds of key strongholds across councils in England and ceding control of the devolved Welsh Parliament – casting a long shadow over the future of Starmer’s leadership.

“On both fronts (Brown and Harman) they are very future-looking roles, they’re vital to how we strengthen our country and take it forward,” Starmer told reporters.

“We have to set out the path ahead and that’s what I intend to do in the coming days – how we rebuild, how we convince people about hope for the future. And we haven’t done enough of that,” he said. He reiterated that he did not intend to walk away and “plunge the country into chaos” following the “tough” election results. “We made unnecessary mistakes. One of which was that we, rightly in my view, levelled with the public about the challenges that we face as a country, both on the finances and internationally.

But what we didn’t do enough is to convince them about the change that would impact them, how their lives would be better. The hope wasn’t there enough in the first two years of this government.

 “I think the right thing to do is to rebuild and show the path forward,” he said.