BRITAIN:GORDON BROWN faced a fresh challenge to his authority yesterday as two senior MPs demanded he sack foreign secretary David Miliband for seeming to position himself as the prime minister's potential successor.
Mr Miliband again insisted he was not running a leadership campaign, while defending the original newspaper article omitting any supporting reference to the troubled prime minister which prompted headlines yesterday proclaiming "Labour at war".
Speaking on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show, Mr Miliband said he had "always supported Gordon's leadership of the party" and believed he could "hang on" despite renewed plotting against him in the aftermath of last week's defeat in the Glasgow East byelection.
Dismissing suggestions that his Guardian article had been designed to destabilise Mr Brown's position, Mr Miliband insisted: "I think the worst thing at the moment would be if we all went mute. I think it's right to say we've taken some hits, but actually we've got ideas about the future of the country, we do want to engage with people."
Mr Miliband going "mute" would have been Downing Street's preference, judging by a series of hostile briefings reflected in reports yesterday accusing the foreign secretary of egotism, disloyalty and a lack of judgment worthy of dismissal or demotion in an expected cabinet reshuffle.
Even the supportive interventions of senior backbenchers Bob Marshall-Andrews and Geraldine Smith underlined the dilemma facing the prime minister - raising questions as to whether he would feel able to sack a man now widely seen as his likely successor or, alternatively, "bind" Mr Miliband closer to his leadership by making him chancellor of the exchequer.
Serial rebel Mr Marshall-Andrews accused Mr Miliband of being "duplicitous" and of "quite clearly" mounting a challenge to the prime minister "in a contemptible way". Of the foreign secretary's offending newspaper article, Mr Marshall-Andrews said: "The complete and conspicuous absence of mention of the prime minister at this particular stage obviously conveys its own message. It is a quite deliberate message but . . . it is a duplicitous message which is the worst possible kind of politics."
If Mr Miliband did not resign and mount "a proper leadership challenge" the MP said Mr Brown should sack him - while warning that failure to do so would further undermine the prime minister's authority.
"If he doesn't, the danger is that he [Mr Brown] will compound a probably undeserved reputation for being indecisive," Mr Marshall-Andrews said.
Ms Smith had no doubt Mr Miliband's article had been "done quite deliberately to stir things up" and said such behaviour was unacceptable. Supporting Mr Brown as the man with the experience to lead Britain through tough times, Ms Smith said that if Mr Miliband returned to the backbenches "he'd become the nonentity he was before his accelerated promotion."