LONDON: Darren Jones, \u200cchief secretary to outgoing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and one of his key allies, ruled himself out of any contest to succeed the Labour leader on Wednesday and threw his support behind the only candidate, Andy Burnham.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndy Burnham is going to be the next prime minister. And if there was a contest \u200cof Labour \u200cParty members, he would win,\u201d Jones \u200ctold \u2060Sky News.<\/p>\n
Jones had \u2060been touted as one possible candidate who could challenge Burnham in a leadership contest and his decision to back the former Greater Manchester mayor means Burnham is likely to become prime minister \u2060in the middle of July, \u200crather than September after \u200ca leadership contest.<\/p>\n
Jones said he had been \u200creassured by Burnham about his economic policy, \u200can area of concern for investors after he said last year that the country had to stop being in \u201chock to the bond \u200cmarkets,\u201d comments he later said had been misrepresented.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe talked \u2026 a \u2060lot \u2060about what he (Burnham) was thinking on the economy and what my thoughts were on that, and some of the potential ways forward for the new government,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Starmer said on Monday he would step down following months of pressure over the party\u2019s poor poll ratings and setbacks in recent local elections. The next prime minister will be Britain\u2019s seventh leader in 10 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Darren Jones, \u200cchief secretary to outgoing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and one of his key allies, ruled himself out of any contest to succeed the Labour leader on Wednesday and threw his support behind the only candidate, Andy Burnham. \u201cAndy Burnham is going to be the next prime minister. And if there was …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":99510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99495"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99511,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99495\/revisions\/99511"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}