 He became a party spokesman on local government, joined the shadow cabinet in 1992 as Shadow Health Secretary and became Shadow Education Secretary in 1994.After Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 general election, he became Secretary of State for Education and Employment, thus becoming Britain's first blind cabinet minister (Henry Fawcett, husband of suffragist Millicent Fawcett, had been a member of the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is the executive committee, more than a century before).The role of Education Secretary was a vital one in a government whose prime minister had in 1996 described his priorities as "education, education, education" and which had made reductions in school class sizes a pledge.