Eurosceptic named new UK foreign minister as EU vote looms

LONDON - Agence France-Presse

Britain's new Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond leaves 10 Downing Street in central London, July 15, 2015. REUTERS Photo

British Prime Minister David Cameron named arch-eurosceptic Philip Hammond as his new foreign secretary on Tuesday in a major cabinet reshuffle ahead of next year's general election.
      
Former defence secretary Hammond, who replaces William Hague, supports Britain leaving the European Union in a referendum in 2017 unless significant powers are returned to London.
      
Tuesday's reshuffle is the biggest since Cameron's Conservative-led coalition government took office in 2010 and marks a bid to broaden his party's appeal at the election.
      
He has promised a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in three years' time if he stays in power.
      
Newspapers billed the reshuffle as a cull of the "pale, male and stale" which opened the door for a new wave of women to get ministerial jobs.
      
It also saw the government turn more eurosceptic as Cameron seeks to face down the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), which many lawmakers fear could take seats from the Conservatives at the 2015 election.
      
"I think it (the reshuffle) will be interpreted in Europe as raising the stakes and showing that this is now getting more serious," Mats Persson, director of the Open Europe think-tank in London, told AFP.
      
Most current opinion polls put the main opposition centre-left Labour party several points ahead of the centre-right Conservatives, with UKIP in third position ahead of Cameron's centrist coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.
                      
Hammond, 58, is seen as a safe pair of hands whose appointment to the Foreign Office would reassure eurosceptics.
     
"Hammond isn't the kind of politician to set the heather alight," wrote political commentator James Forsyth in a blog posting for the Spectator magazine.
      
"But the fact that someone who has said that they'd vote to leave if substantial powers were not returned to the UK in the renegotiation is now Foreign Secretary sends a clear message to the rest of the EU about the British position."       

He has been replaced as defence secretary by Michael Fallon, a veteran loyalist.
      
Cameron also said Tuesday he had nominated Jonathan Hill, the leader of parliament's upper chamber the House of Lords, as Britain's next EU Commissioner.
      
Hill is little known, even in Britain, but was described by media as a mild eurosceptic.
      
As well as Hague, who chose to step down after four years in the job, around a dozen middle-aged, white male ministers are leaving Cameron's government.
      
Many are being replaced by younger women who were only elected in 2010 but whose stock has been rising.
      
These include Nicky Morgan, a former lawyer who will take over from Michael Gove as education secretary, and Liz Truss.
      
Political commentator Janan Ganesh wrote in the Financial Times that the reshuffle was "meant to show female voters that the Conservative party is not a woman-free zone".
      
Cameron had promised in opposition to make a third of his government female but has fallen well short of this target until now.
      
Hague's announcement that he was quitting effectively ends the political career of a man Cameron called "one of the leading lights of the Conservative Party for a generation".
     
He led the Conservatives during a torrid period between 1997 and 2001 before retreating from frontline politics to write historical biographies for several years.
      
As foreign secretary, he was a leading voice urging the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before the House of Commons last year voted down missile strikes in a major foreign policy blow to Cameron.
      
In recent months, he had worked closely with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie on a high-profile campaign to end rape as a weapon of war.
      
Hague will continue to serve as a minister with responsibility for managing business in the House of Commons before stepping down as a lawmaker at next year's election.