BRITAIN: Clare Short's 23-year parliamentary career reached its apparently inevitable denouement yesterday when she resigned the Labour whip, denouncing Tony Blair's "half-truths" and his "arrogant, error-prone government".
She said she wanted to use her remaining years in parliament as an independent MP, free to campaign for a hung parliament, a check on the executive and an end to presidential government.
Ms Short may now be expelled from the party, although she said she wanted to remain a party member. She had been repeatedly warned that her support for a hung parliament meant she was opposed to the election of some Labour MPs.
Her resignation yesterday came as she faced the risk of formal censure by Labour's chief whip, Jacqui Smith, over her support for a hung parliament and her failure to attend key Commons votes.
Plans to ask the national executive to expel Ms Short from the party were shelved just before the Labour conference for fear they would overshadow what was likely to be an anyway highly charged gathering.
Ms Short said she had decided to leave the parliamentary party after being constantly "threatened" by the chief whip.
"This is a sad, big thing for me. I just want to be free to say what I think to be true. I can't go on being rebuked every week by the chief whip," she said.
Her resignation led to a bout of recriminations yesterday, with the whips' office accusing her of leaking the news to the media, and Ms Short blaming the whips' office.
It is possible the news leaked after the Liberal Democrats tried to persuade her to follow the left-wing former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore and join them. She said pointedly in her resignation letter that she would remain a social democrat.
Her increasingly strident attacks on the government, and allegations of lying by colleagues, lost her support across the parliamentary party, even though she is admired for her personal warmth and record as international development secretary.
Her former ministerial colleague Lord Foulkes described her resignation of the Labour whip as "the equivalent of the final chapter of a modern Greek tragedy", adding: "Her career had been going down and down and down for months and months." He said her fortunes turned when she voted for the Iraq war and subsequently resigned from the cabinet in May 2003. She had openly voiced her criticisms of the war, but Mr Blair persuaded her that she had a vital role to play as international development secretary in the reconstruction of Iraq. He also insisted he was using his influence to persuade the US to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Lord Foulkes said Mr Blair had given her a uniquely free rein and twice saved Ms Short from deselection by her constituency.
The anti-war MP Peter Kilfoyle described her decision to resign the Labour whip as a mistake, saying: "It is better always fight your corner from within."
Ms Short enjoyed a sometimes impish love-hate relationship with Mr Blair in the first term of the Labour government, but gradually her disillusionment tipped over into contempt and finally near hatred.
Unlike Robin Cook, who resigned as House of Commons leader before the war started, she openly accused Mr Blair of lying over the Iraq war in an attempt to win public backing.
In her autobiography, An Honourable Deception, she rejected the findings of the Butler inquiry that the prime minister acted in good faith over the war:
"I am afraid it is clear that the prime minister did knowingly mislead." She also claimed that the then head of the civil service, Lord Turnbull, told her that Mr Blair had committed himself irrevocably in August 2002 to go to war as an ally of the US.
Like former home secretary David Blunkett in his memoirs published this month, she claimed that Gordon Brown supported the war only because he feared that otherwise he would be sacked as chancellor.
Ms Short was first elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 1983. She came to prominence with a campaign against the Sun newspaper's page three girls and her bill to ban them. In 1996 she stunned Westminster when she was reunited with her son Toby, who she had given up for adoption when she was 18.
Recently she expressed her opposition to the replacement of Trident, Blairite reform of the public services and what she described as government by diktat.
She also backed calls to impeach Mr Blair over the war. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this year she accused the government of being complicit in war crimes.