The Labour backbencher Diane Abbott has attacked the prime minister's reshuffle, accusing him of turning his Cabinet into a "Boy's Own project".

Ms Abbott said that although Tony Blair had given women some senior posts in his reshuffle, they had been squeezed out of key spending positions.

In the reshuffle Margaret Beckett was moved from the Department of Trade and Industry to become Leader of the House; Baroness Jay was made Leader of the Lords; Ann Taylor became Chief Whip; and former Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman was sacked from the Cabinet altogether.

'Men at the centre'

"What we have now is a highly centralised government, and at the centre they are all men," Ms Abbott told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.

"Women have been pushed aside from the key spending ministries and it would appear that the New Labour project is definitely a kind of Boy's Own project."

She said although those women who were in the Cabinet held important positions, "you don't have a women in in one of the great offices of state and you don't have a woman at the key spending ministries."

'Just William'

The jockeying for position between the rival supporters of Tony Blair and the Chancellor Gordon Brown, was "like nothing so much as Just William and competing gangs," Ms Abbott said.

She added that she did not regard newly appointed Trade Secretary Peter Mandelson - one of the reshuffle's bigger winners - as women-friendly.

"I don't think Peter Mandelson is that friendly to any form of human life," she said jokingly.

"I just think that in an age where women and social issues are so prominent, it's strange to have a political project which on the inside is a lot of male cronies."

Ms Abbott is the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and a member of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee.