Downing Street was desperately trying to keep a lid on the disorganized rebellion against British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday after David Cairns, a Scottish Office minister, resigned from the government, saying there had to be a leadership debate to clear the air.
Cairns appears to have been forced out after No. 10 confronted him on Monday night in the wake of a report by a BBC reporter with strong Scottish connections hinting that a minister of state was on the verge of quitting.
Downing Street denied that it had been involved in leaking Cairns’ name and called for unity at a time of economic turmoil.
A number of Cabinet ministers rallied strongly behind Brown on Tuesday, and Labour’s national executive committee rejected a call for the distribution of leadership nomination forms, the key demand of the rebels.
The committee said there was no legal requirement to send out the forms under the party’s rules.
Cairns’ resignation was dismissed by loyalist Labour members of parliament as “no big surprise.”
They said he had been a former researcher to Siobhain McDonagh, one of the leading rebels. They also attached blame to him for his involvement in the recent failed Labour by-election campaign in Glasgow East against the Scottish Nationalists.
But Cairns, widely respected for his decency, denied he was part of an orchestrated plot. He said that he had counseled rebels against calling for a leadership election, saying he had told them the move “was not particularly wise, strategic or going anywhere, so I did not think it was a great idea.”
“What is really depressing me is that someone somewhere leaked their names, so that this debate has started,” he said.
“It is going on now, whether we pretend it is or not, and rather than seize this opportunity to have that debate my government chose to diminish these people, claiming they were malcontents, that they were stupid, that they did not speak for anyone,” he said.
“Collective responsibility does matter, and if you cannot accept that you have to go,” he added.
Downing Street has denied that it has briefed against the rebels, or attempted to flush them out well ahead of the Labour conference. It also denied that it had disclosed Cairns’s name to newspapers late on Monday, insisting the whole effort over the last 24 hours had been to keep him in the government.
Cairns said on Tuesday that he had resigned with a heavy heart and had been in personal turmoil, being the kind of person “who thought the worst day of a Labour government was better than the best day of a Tory or an SNP administration.”
But the former priest and ex-Northern Ireland minister said he had been wrestling with his conscience for months over whether to continue to support Brown.
In a letter accepting his resignation, the prime minister praised his work in office, but added that at a time of “economic upheaval ... I believe it is vital that we as a government, and as a country, stand together in the face of these difficult times and concentrate all our efforts on helping the British people to come through them.”
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