Why Baroness Ashton got the job

Of course, as Iain Martin suggests, it is a bizarre decision to appoint Baroness Ashton to the post of EU high representative for Foreign Affairs and security:

But this weird kind of compromise choice is what you get with backroom stitch-ups. With France and Germany settled on Van Rompuy for president, the high representative needed to be from the socialist grouping and a big country. So thoughts turned to Britain. But who did Gordon Brown have to hand after the machinations of recent weeks? Not David Miliband, or Ashdown or Patten. No, at the eleventh hour modern Britain had just Baroness Ashton to offer.

The reasons are two-fold.  Ashton got the job because Blair didn't and for the simple fact that Europe wanted a woman and Ashton was available.