LONDON, (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday pushed through his biggest government shake-up since coming to power in 2010, promoting women and Eurosceptics to senior roles in an appeal to voters in next May’s national election.
In one surprise development, William Hague, Britain’s most senior diplomat for the past four years, voluntarily stood down allowing Cameron to appoint Philip Hammond, the defence minister and a prominent Eurosceptic, to the influential post.
Michael Gove, a longstanding Cameron ally and one of his party’s most prominent right-wing ideologues, was sacked as education secretary.
After last minute adjustments, women will now make up five of the 22-person Cabinet, compared with three before. A further three senior female politicians will also have the right to attend Cabinet meetings, up from two previously.
Other women politicians were promoted to junior ministerial positions.
With his ruling Conservatives trailing the opposition Labour party in opinion polls by up to seven percentage points, the changes were seen as an attempt by Cameron to address criticism that his government was dominated by white, privately-educated middle-aged men.
“This is very much a reshuffle based on the upcoming election. Out with the old, in with the new; an attempt to emphasise diversity and put a few more Eurosceptic faces to the fore,” said Matthew Ashton, a politics specialist at Nottingham Trent University.
Hammond’s pick as foreign secretary stoked speculation that Cameron was trying to give his part of the coalition a more Eurosceptic tinge to please an unruly wing of the party and to counter an electoral threat from the anti-EU UK Independence Party which won Britain’s European elections in May.
The choice of Hammond sends a powerful signal to Britain’s European allies. In 2013, he said that if the European Union failed to change and agree new terms for Britain’s membership he would rather leave the bloc.
