When Margaret Thatcher embarked on a Cabinet reshuffle following her second general election victory in 1983, she memorably commented: "I'm no butcher, but I have learned to carve." By and large, it was true - the Iron Lady rarely put square pegs into round holes and never, but never, carried out her reshuffles by negotiation. Tony Blair, by contrast, has had eight years to learn the art of carving - and still appears unable to grasp even the rudiments. To describe last weekend's post-election shuffle as a total and utter shambles would be putting it kindly, and it is sorely tempting to devote the whole of this week's column to the debacle. In the wake of a disappointing election result, it should have been an opportunity for Mr Blair both to stamp his authority on the Government, and freshen up its senior ranks. That he failed in both of these tasks has only added to the sense of impending doom hanging over his premiership. The Prime Minister had planned a radical restructuring of the Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to create a new "Ministry for Respect" under David Blunkett. Given Mr Blair's own emphasis on this issue at his press conference on Thursday, it is all the more puzzling that he let John Prescott and Charles Clarke talk him out of it. He also passed up the chance to start putting in place a fresh, energetic ministerial team, instead re-appointing tired old ministers such as Geoff Hoon, Margaret Beckett and Jack Straw. The latter duo almost certainly only survived because they are close allies of Chancellor Gordon Brown - and thereby hangs another tale. For all his immense political gifts, Mr Brown appears to be worryingly prone to the besetting sin amongst political leaders of placing loyalty above ability. If he ends up promoting camp-followers to his future Cabinet ahead of those who deserve to be there on merit, he will not turn out to be half as good a Prime Minister as his admirers hope he will be. I could go on - but there are other, ultimately more important issues thrown up by the election result than the rearranging of the deckchairs on New Labour's Titanic. To put it bluntly, our electoral system has perpetrated a constitutional outrage in which a Government has been re-elected with the smallest share of the popular vote in the last 100 years. As I stated on several occasions in the run-up to the election, the Tories always faced an electoral mountain on May 5 in that their support is so much more dispersed than Labour's. What it actually amounted to in practice was that it took 26,843 voters to elect a Labour MP, 44,530 to elect a Conservative, and 96,484 to elect a Liberal Democrat. In the North-East, the figures were even more stark. Labour won 580,453 votes compared to 256,295 votes for the Lib Dems - now clearly the second party of the region - and 214,414 for the Conservatives. Yet as we all know, that produced for the second election running an outcome in terms of seats of Labour 28, Lib Dems 1, Conservatives 1. In other words, it took 12 times as many votes to elect a Liberal Democrat MP in the North-East than the number it took to elect a Labour MP, and 10 times as many to elect a Conservative MP. Or to look at it another way, given the 57pc turnout in the region, Labour won 93pc of the region's parliamentary seats on the basis of the support of just over 30pc of the electorate. The problem will partially be addressed by the forthcoming boundary review which will, broadly speaking, create more suburban constituencies and fewer inner-city ones. It is set to be hugely controversial on Tyneside, turning both Newcastle North and Newcastle East into possible Labour-Lib Dem marginals while paradoxically making Newcastle Central a safe seat. But either way, it will not address the basic inequities in an electoral system which is now beginning to work against the Tories in the same way it has always worked against the Lib Dems. The only way in which that can be addressed is for a root-and-branch reform of the voting system. In the glad, confident morning of Mr Blair's early years in power, electoral reform was very much a part of what was then known as the New Labour "project." In his 1997 party conference speech, the Prime Minister held out the prospect of building a lasting centre-left coalition that would keep the Tories out of power for 100 years. But the subject slipped off the radar around 1999, and its absence from Labour's 2001 manifesto prompted me to ask Alastair Campbell about it at a press briefing. "Oh come on, even the Liberal Democrats aren't talking about that any more!" was the spin doctor's typically dismissive, as well as inaccurate, response. Such was the contemptuous ease with which New Labour jettisoned what had been a key plank of its once-ambitious constitutional reform agenda. But proportional representation - already well-established in the European Parliament, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly - could be an idea whose time has now come. We hear that Mr Brown is not enthusiastic about it, and will continue to oppose its introduction for Westminster. If so, that might be something else he has to revise his opinions on if and when he finally makes it to Number 10. | 
