By Hilary White
MANCHESTER, September 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com ) – Ruth Kelly, Gordon Brown’s Secretary of State for Transport and one of the most prominent Catholic Labour MPs, announced at the party’s national conference that she will be leaving the Cabinet to “spend more time with her family.”
“Being in frontline politics,” she said, “and bringing up four children, and being a constituency MP, it has not been easy all the time. I do think it is time just to take a step back and repay the support that [my family] have given me over the years.”
The Prime Minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today that there were “no political issues between Ruth and me.”
But the expression of a politician’s desire to “spend more time with family” is normally taken by analysts as a common political cliché covering a conflict with the party, and Kelly’s announcement is no exception. The Daily Telegraph is linking Kelly’s departure to her opposition to the government’s human embryology bill, saying she informed the Prime Minister that she could not reconcile her Catholic faith with the bill’s provisions for human cloning and the creation of human/animal hybrids.
Kelly’s Cabinet colleagues were reportedly “furious” when she had been excused from a key vote on the legislation, attending a meeting in Brussels instead. It had been made clear to her that she would be expected to vote with the party when the bill next comes to the House of Commons.
The Times reports that while Kelly “chose to appear loyal” to Brown in her departure speech, “her private view of Mr Brown is considerably more jaundiced.” Her unexpected resignation is regarded by party insiders as a blow to Brown’s efforts to rally his flagging authority in the party. Francis Elliott, writing from the Manchester conference, said, “Ms. Kelly – fearful of being sacked, dreading another public test of her Catholicism over a forthcoming Commons vote on embryo research and despairing of Mr. Brown’s administration – had to be talked out of announcing her resignation from the Cabinet about two weeks ago.”
Kelly had previously served as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Minister for Women and Equality and Secretary of State for Education and Skills, but she clashed with the party over the passage of the Sexual Orientation Regulations last year when religious bodies were seeking a compromise that would protect religious freedoms.
She has been a strong party loyalist, however, voting with the party on several contentious issues that have seen other MPs rebel. Out of the fourteen votes during the Blair government in which the government promoted the homosexual political agenda, Kelly absented herself for twelve.
Kelly’s political future is in some question with the precipitous drop in Labour’s popularity and the consequent surge for the Conservatives. In her seat of Bolton West in the last election, the Conservative candidate received just 2,064 fewer votes than Kelly, giving her the smallest majority of any in the current cabinet.