Profile: Margaret Beckett

Mrs Beckett has sat on the front bench since 1984

Margaret Beckett - who has briefly led the Labour party - is its great survivor.

It will come as no surprise to her colleagues that she has become the UK's first female foreign secretary - she has been a loyal servant to Tony Blair.

Despite being a gritty left-winger, she has had no problem in sitting in the centre ground under her prime minister.

After Labour's general election victory in 1997, she was briefly trade and industry secretary, but moved in 1998 to become leader of the House of Commons, a role in which she earned many plaudits from all parties.

She was responsible for a fair degree of modernisation of Commons procedure, introducing the Westminster Hall chamber and deferred divisions.

After the 2001 election she became the first secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.

Views softened

Mrs Beckett, like many in the Labour Party, has travelled a long way from a hard left stance in the early 1980s.

Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, in January 1943, she was drawn into politics through the horrors of apartheid rather than domestic issues.

A party official and special adviser to minister Judith Hart in the early 1970s, she became MP for Lincoln in 1974 and served as a government whip and then a junior education minister until she lost her seat in 1979.

That year, at the age of 36, she married Leo Beckett, chairman of her local Labour party.

He is a central member of her team.

She returned to the Commons as MP for Derby South in 1983 and has sat on the front bench since 1984.

As Neil Kinnock's spirit of reform spread through the party, some of her hard left views were softened.

Key architect

Mrs Beckett served as deputy leader of the party - the first woman to do so - under the late John Smith, and was acting leader of the opposition for three months in 1994.

She stood for leadership of the party but was beaten by Mr Blair.

But during that time she demonstrated an ability to keep the momentum of Labour's opinion poll supremacy over the Tories.

She was a key architect of Labour's renewed energy in the mid-1990s.