Kennedy, who had won a number of fans in the packaging sector in her nine months at Defra, quit this morning on the day after Labour slumped to a historic low of just 15% of votes in the European parliamentary elections.
Early reports of Kennedy’s resignation suggest that she decided to resign after she was pressed, but refused, to give a pledge of loyalty to Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Kennedy, who was the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, took on the waste remit last October, replacing Joan Ruddock at Defra.
She has since been a champion of anaerobic digestion to deal with food waste and recently visited Closed Loop Recycling in Dagenham, east London, to find out about food-grade plastics recycling.
She told the BBC that she had been unhappy with Brown’s leadership “for some time”, but her timing comes amid a reshuffle of junior ministers which follows last Friday’s reshuffle of the Cabinet.
She told the BBC: “I was asked if I wanted to stay in government and if I did, would I give an assurance that I would be in support of Gordon Brown? I wasn’t able to give them that assurance and therefore I have not been reappointed to the government.”
She said that she was particularly unhappy about what she saw as a series of briefings from Number 10 against individual politicians, leaks and “smears against colleagues”.
“It’s a style, a type of politics that I have fought against all my working life since battling against the Militant Tendency here in Liverpool. It’s not a kind of politics that I want to be associated with,” she said.
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