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LONDON, May 7: British Prime Minister Tony Blair reshuffled his cabinet on Friday, keeping his popular heir-apparent Gordon Brown as finance minister, as he pledged to govern “wisely and sensibly” after his Labour Party won a third term in power in a general election that slashed its parliamentary majority by more than half.
Jack Straw, a central figure in Blair’s decision to take Britain into the Iraq war, will remain foreign secretary as Britain prepares to take over the rotating European Union presidency on July 1 and hosts the Group of Eight summit in Scotland on July 6-8.
John Reid, formerly health secretary, became defence secretary, replacing Geoff Hoon who held the job throughout the Iraq conflict, then endured a public grilling over the suicide of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly.
David Blunkett, forced to resign as home secretary last December amid a furore over a visa application for his lover’s Filipina nanny, returned as secretary for work and pensions.
Labour made history on Thursday when it snared an unprecedented third straight term in power, winning 355 seats in the 646-seat House of Commons and 35.2 percent of the vote, against 197 for the Conservatives (32.3 percent) and 62 for the Liberal Democrats (22.1 percent).
Smaller parties and independents took the remaining seats, with two constituencies yet to declare their results.
But the outcome meant Blair’s majority in the Commons had been slashed by more than half, to a projected 66, from the commanding 167-seat edge that it captured in Labour’s June 2001 landslide.
Brown, a more popular figure than Blair thanks to his stewardship of Britain’s robust economy, had been expected to stay on as chancellor of the exchequer, the second most powerful job in the government.
He has made little secret of his yearning to succeed Blair as prime minister, but his ambitions were frustrated when Blair announced last year that, if re-elected, he intended to serve a full term.
Discontent with Blair’s decision to take Britain into the Iraq war alongside US President George W. Bush cost Labour dearly at the polls, dealing the prime minister “a bloody nose” in the words of more than one analyst.
Blair acknowledged Friday that Iraq had been “deeply divisive,” but insisted that he now had a clear idea what the nation wanted for the economy, health, education and welfare.
BIGGEST CASUALTY: Perhaps the biggest casualty of the election was Northern Ireland’s David Trimble, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and leader of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party.
He went down to defeat at the hands of the hardline Democratic Unionist Party led by firebrand Ian Paisley, as the DUP and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, dominated the Northern Ireland results.
Mr Hoon’s departure Friday as defence secretary was not unexpected, after he was implicated in the David Kelly affair. He played a decisive role in identifying Kelly, a respected Ministry of Defence expert on weapons of mass destruction and former UN arms inspector, as the source of a BBC report alleging that Blair’s government had “sexed up” intelligence on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.
Dr Kelly’s suicide in July 2003 threw Blair into the worst crisis of his premiership, before a judicial inquiry cleared his government of serious wrongdoing.
Mr Hoon now will be leader of the Commons, in charge of the government’s legislative programme, replacing Peter Hain who takes on the thankless task of Northern Ireland secretary where he will try to restore the power-sharing government that has been suspended since October 2002. —AFP
