Blair blare in UK

Saturday, May 3 1997

Blair blare in UK

Anjali Mody

DOWNING STREET'S NEW COUPLE: Tony and Cherie Blair hug each other after addressing Labour Party workers and supporters outside the Royal Festival Hall in London on Friday.

LONDON, May 2: Britain's new Prime Minister Tony Blair, will go to Parliament with a historic 179 seat majority. The landslide victory for Labour is the largest since the war. It was certainly more than Labour had hoped for, and way more than anything anyone had imagined, apart from the opinion polls, whose predictions have been matched rather accurately by the result.This gives Labour 419 seats of the 639 in the House of Commons. The Conservatives will have 163, and the Liberal Democrats 45. The nationalist parties have 10 and `others' the rest.

Blairlater named his core team with Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw as Home Secretary and Gordon Brown as Chancellor of Exchequer.

This was an election, where records were made and broken. The Conservatives lost the largest number of seats ever, the highest number of cabinet ministers, and were completely wiped out in Scotland and Wales. The Liberal Democrats won a record 45 seats. This Parliament will also see the largest number of women MPs some 120 in all, and mostly Labour. There will also be a larger number of ethnic minority MPs, of whom five are Asian with two siting MPs -- Keith Vaz and Piara Khabra -- and three new members, Mohamed Sarwar, from Glasgow, Marsha Singh from Bradford West, and Ashok Kumar, all from Labour.

John Major retained his seat. But the Conservatives lost six ministers, including Foreign Minsiter Malcolm Rifkind.

Every election has its extra special spot. This one's was the constituency of Tatton, in Northwest England here former BBC war reporter Martin Bell, whose campaign was for clean politics, won by an astonishing 11.077 vote margin. A visibly moved Bell said said, ``I believe you have lit a beacon that will illuminate some dark corners including in the mother of parliaments herself.''

Imran Khan's father-in-law, James Goldsmith, the other ``extra special'' interest of this election, lost his deposit after he failed to get even 5 per cent of the vote.