The versatile John Reid, the new home secretary, has been the muscle man and trouble-shooter of Tony Blair's administrations. The prime minister relies on this tough, hard-talking, hard-headed Scot to put the house in order when things go awry. And this is precisely what Mr Blair will have told him yesterday morning in relation to the chaos over released foreign prisoners.
He has flitted from job to job in the cabinet, not like a butterfly but like a rhinoceros, charging in to sort out whatever has gone wrong. He will find plenty to do in that regard at the Home Office. Mr Reid is not a man of subtlety or the light touch. He is of the straightforward, no-nonsense, bull-headed school of politics.
Mr Reid, MP for Airdrie and Shotts, has had a succession of ministerial jobs, which included armed forces minister; Scottish secretary; Northern Ireland secretary, where he was the first Roman Catholic to hold that job; chairman of the Labour Party, and after that leader of the Commons.
He became health secretary when Alan Milburn resigned. Then he was moved to the ministry of defence, where he succeeded the long-serving Geoff Hoon.
Mr Reid, who will be 59 next week, was born in Cardowan, Lanarkshire. He is the son of a postman and a factory worker, and once said: "My ancestors were digging roads or howking coal." He was a political activist from early on, joining the Labour Party in 1968, although in the early 1970s he flirted with communism, rejoining Labour in 1976.
Mr Reid, who has two sons, married his first wife Cathy in 1969. She died in 1998. In 2002 he married Brazilian film director Carine Adler.
- (PA)