LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron named arch-Euroskeptic Philip Hammond as his new foreign secretary on Tuesday in a major Cabinet reshuffle ahead of next year’s general election.

Former defense secretary Hammond, who replaces William Hague, supports Britain leaving the European Union unless significant powers are returned to London before a referendum promised for 2017.

Tuesday’s reshuffle is the biggest since Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government took office in 2010 and marks a bid to broaden his party’s appeal at the election in May 2015.

The prime minister has pledged to hold a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in three years’ time if he stays in power.

Newspapers billed the reshuffle as a cull of the “pale, male and stale” which opened the door for a new wave of women to get ministerial jobs. It also saw the government turn more Euroskeptic as Cameron seeks to face down the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP), which many lawmakers fear could take seats from the Conservatives at the election.

“I think it (the reshuffle) will be interpreted in Europe as raising the stakes and showing that this is now getting more serious,” Mats Persson, director of the Open Europe think-tank in London, said.

Most current opinion polls put the main opposition center-left Labour party several points ahead of the center-right Conservatives, with UKIP in third position ahead of Cameron’s centrist coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.