Cabinet Office Minister Mo Mowlam has declared tackling social exclusion and drugs are her top priorities.

In her first major speech since leaving the Northern Ireland Office, Ms Mowlam said reducing poverty was a crucial part of her current job.

Her remarks to the Labour Group of the Local Government Association in London follow reports that she has been keeping a low profile since being moved in a reshuffle in October.

Ms Mowlam, the so-called cabinet enforcer responsible for co-ordinating policy across the government, said she had spent a number of weeks looking at the wide brief.

She had concluded that tackling social exclusion - homelessness, teenage pregnancies, truancy and poverty - and reducing drug addiction would head her agenda.

"These two together can begin to make a difference if we make progress in communities of high deprivation and high poverty," she said.

But she denied reports that she had taken over control of the war against drugs from the government's so-called "drugs tsar" Keith Hellawell.

Ms Mowlam used her speech to attack the Tories who she said had been captured by the "hard right" under William Hague's leadership.

"The Conservative party is now accelerating towards extremism," she claimed. "The lurch to the right is becoming a race to the right."

Ms Mowlam accused the Tories of wanting to reduce the NHS to an emergencies-only service with people relying on private health insurance for other treatment.

She also claimed the Tories were using the "flu crisis as a piece of political opportunism."