Labor Government Getting Used To Perks Of Power Party Already Makes Big Changes In Setting Interest Rates, Foreign Policy

Settling himself at a huge table in the ornate office from which Britain once ran an empire, new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook remarked, “Not a bad little room, is it?”

In his first couple of hectic weeks in office, Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair has wrought some big changes - from surrendering the power to set interest rates to telling ministers to call him Tony at Cabinet meetings.

Yet Labor’s top politicians, after a generation out of office, often look as if they still can’t believe all this is really theirs: the big offices, the limos, the titles, the trips, the power.

Blair recalled being told the deputy prime minister was on the phone - and instinctively wondering what Michael Heseltine, deputy to his defeated Conservative Party predecessor, John Major, could want.

When Blair’s real deputy, John Prescott, was asked how he has settled in, the former ship’s waiter who rose through the trade union movement chuckled.

“The car’s outside,” he said on BBC Television. “And then there were five boxes (of ministerial documents) I got yesterday. … The real problems of government: Does the key fit the red box or the black one?”

While reveling in the novelty, Britain’s new leaders have set to work at breakneck speed.

Five days after Labor’s May 1 landslide election victory, the new treasury chief, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, announced that the Bank of England - not the government - will now set interest rates.

It was a profound change, bringing Britain in line with the United States and Germany, and one that wasn’t foreshadowed in Labor’s election platform.

Cook, the foreign secretary, hurried off to France and Germany to say that this island nation has finally gone European and will stop being the chief rebel in the European Union.

On Wednesday, when Parliament opened, Blair’s government produced a package of measures to put in motion some - but not all - of the constitutional changes Labor promised.

And Blair promised that the Labor government will reform the welfare state and create higher standards in schools, things the Conservatives used to say.

But he also sprang measures the Conservatives would never take: a ban on handguns, a ban on tobacco advertising, a commitment to a freedom of information act, a minimum wage.

A bill providing for referendums this fall on setting up regional legislatures for Scotland and Wales is already before the new Parliament.

Blair’s parliamentary majority is so huge - 180 more lawmakers than all the other parties combined in the 659-member Commons - that every bill seems sure to pass.

So far, just two clouds have drifted across this blue horizon.

Relations with corporate Britain soured with warnings from British Telecom and airport operator BAA that they will sue rather than pay a proposed windfall profits tax on utility companies.

On Sunday, Scotland’s top prosecutor ordered an investigation of allegations in The News of The World newspaper that newly elected Labor lawmaker Mohamed Sarwar tried to bribe one of his opponents. Sarwar, Britain’s first Muslim member of Parliament, called the allegations “totally false.”