Penguin Delta and Echo have to cover the final 200 miles between them, with the last team due to set out in the next fortnight."The wonderful thing about getting there," said Caroline Hamilton, speaking from base camp in Resolute Bay, "is that it will be our North Pole." As the woman who dreamed up the expedition two years ago, she has endlessly imagined herself at her destination, walking in a circle through all the different time zones. The housewives, surgeons, teachers and policewomen making the historic journey from Resolute Bay, in the northern-most tip of Canada, to the Pole reached the halfway point last week. The journey across the cracking ice-sheet has been divided between five relay teams, each of four women, who are airlifted in as the previous team's supplies run out. The first three teams, Penguin Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, have covered 200 miles between them, despite the drifting of the ice-cap which meant Penguin Charlie were at times almost running to stand still. The shout echoed across the polar ice-cap: "Portillo's out!" The British participants of the first all-women expedition to the North Pole may be preoccupied by their own gargantuan task, but as news of the Labour landslide reached the Arctic Circle on Friday they took a few seconds to reflect on the realisation of someone else's dream.

Sinn Fein's success in winning two seats has sharpened the potential for conflict.Europe. The biggest challenge of all, with the EU summit in Maastricht on 23 May, and the Inter-Governmental Conference in Amsterdam in June. Reducing class sizes below 30 for all 5-7-year-olds will cost a great deal.Scotland. The election will give fresh impetus to Labour's devolution proposals. But the two-question referendum - do you want a Scottish parliament, and do you want it to have tax-raising powers - will also require immediate legislation.Northern Ireland.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Gordon Brown will meet Eddie George, Governor of the Bank of England, and be told he should put rates up. The NHS. THE Labour government may start with a great fund of public goodwill and a massive parliamentary majority, but almost immediately it will face problems, such as: Interest rates. because in the end, if we are going to get anywhere with the violence that has dogged this society for so long, it is only by building confidence between the different communities.". We have never seen a minister out on the streets like this before, just so chatty and normal," said Maureen McGuigan. Mo Mowlam spoke yesterday of her desire to bring a new "sensitivity" to her cabinet role and, by the time she left, those who had lined the streets to wish her well and enquire after her health following her treatment for a brain tumour, were already softening to the new appointee. Relaxed and chatty, the smiling minister stopped to take a cheeky bite from a child's apple as she moved through the crowds. Then, journalists watched open-mouthed as she stooped to pick up a microphone dropped in the melee.

"We've never had a Secretary of State who has done that," said one veteran reporter."She seems so down to earth. Less than 24 hours into her new post, the first woman Northern Ireland secretary was already pounding the streets of Belfast in a bid to restart the stalled peace process, displaying a new kind of statesmanship unfamiliar to the people of Ulster, writes Ros Wynne-Jones. Educated at a secondary modern school and technical high school in Tunbridge Wells, he came into the Commons as MP for Newcastle East in the 1983 election with Blair and Gordon Brown. With a Commons majority of 179, Labour is ostensibly fireproof, but a majority on this scale also brings problems of maintaining discipline, a task Mr Brown will relish.Frank Dobson, the Shadow Environment Secretary, who as a vaguely "Old Labour" figure was thought in danger of not making the Cabinet, squeezed in under the wire as Secretary of State for Health.. But some of the shine was taken off her appointment by the simultaneous announcement that Frank Field, MP for Birkenhead, will be her Minister of State with responsibility for long-term reform of the welfare state.Donald Dewar, who had been Opposition Chief Whip, and who was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland, will in the Cabinet - piquantly - sit across the table from Lord Irvine, the man who years ago formed a relationship with Mr Dewar's wife and subsequently married her.Mr Dewar's deputy in opposition, Nick Brown, stepped up to take the full Chief Whip post.A former official of the GMB union, Mr Brown, 46, masks a hard-nosed disciplinarianism with a public bar geniality.