
UK Labour leader Keir Starmer is officially prime minister after he received the blessing of King Charles III at Buckingham Palace.

Rachel Reeves becomes UK’s first finance minister

David Lammy is new UK foreign secretary

Previously shadow foreign affairs minister, Lammy travelled widely before the election, particularly to the United States.
He has been working to build ties with Republicans after once writing that former US President Donald Trump was a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sociopath.”
Lammy has strong links with top Democrats and is a close friend of fellow Harvard Law School alumni and former President Barack Obama.
Starmer appoints Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary

Her first ministerial role came under Tony Blair when she was responsible for housing and planning.
Starmer appoints Angela Rayner as deputy

In opposition, Labour members elected Rayner as deputy leader at the same time they voted for Starmer to be leader in 2020.
Labour’s landslide on just over a third of vote
The Labour Party won the 2024 UK general election by a huge margin in terms of seats — 412 seats out of the total 650 in the UK parliament — but with only about a third of the popular vote.
While Labour only won 33.7% of all votes cast, it picked up 412 seats — almost two-thirds of the total — and a bumper majority of 176 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives won 23.7% and picked up only 120 seats.
Effectively, Thursday’s election was 650 separate and unconnected mini-votes. In every constituency, the candidate with the most votes, and not necessarily more than 50%, wins. A party has the numbers to govern if it wins 326 of these races.
Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system for each constituency means that the number of seats a party wins depends largely on how well their votes are spread.
This time, the Conservatives appeared to lose votes to the anti-immigration Reform UK party, thereby splitting their vote in many constituencies, while Labour and centrist Liberal Democrat supporters were encouraged to adopt tactical voting.
Labour’s vote share this time around is far lower than in the 2019 general election — when the party lost by a wide margin, on 262 seats, despite securing 40% of votes.
Brexit proved particularly divisive in many traditional Labour areas. While the Brexit Party — a predecessor to Reform — withdrew candidates in normally Conservative seats to avoid splitting the right-wing vote, it did not do so in Labour ones.
Source: DW