Brown quitting; Conservatives to govern Britain

UPDATED:

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday he’s quitting office and bringing to a close the Labor Party’s 13-year hold on power, as his two chief rivals sealed a coalition deal after the country’s inconclusive election.

Mr. Brown said he will travel to see Queen Elizabeth II to resign — allowing opposition Conservative Party chief David Cameron to take office after Mr. Cameron struck a deal with Nick Clegg, leader of the third-placed Liberal Democrats.

Earlier, senior Labor officials said talks with the third-place Liberal Democrats on forming Britain’s next government had unraveled.

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Five days after a May 6 vote that produced no outright winner, the Liberal Democrats were being wooed by both Labor and the Conservatives, hoping to extract maximum concessions in return for propping up a new administration.

But senior Labor legislators said they feared such a pact — dubbed a “coalition of the defeated” by Conservatives — would lack legitimacy and anger the public, who would then wreak revenge on Labor candidates in future elections.

“We have got to respect the result of the general election and you cannot get away from the fact that Labor didn’t win,” Labor’s Health Secretary Andy Burnham told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Former Labor Party chairman Ian McCartney said Labor should forget a deal to stay in power, and focus on regrouping in opposition without Mr. Brown at their helm.

Mr. Cameron’s party has spent five days negotiating with the Liberal Democrats, led by Nick Clegg, and has said it is prepared to agree to either a formal coalition or a looser pact in which the Liberal Democrats support the Conservatives’ legislative agenda.

Mr. Clegg’s Liberal Democrats have demanded that Britain change its voting system toward proportional representation, which could greatly increase their future seats in Parliament. In the latest election, Liberal Democrats won almost a quarter of the overall vote but only 9 percent of House of Commons seats.

Conservatives for the most part are adamantly against changing the voting system, which favors Britain’s two larger parties. The Conservatives won 306 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons last week — just short of the 326 needed for a majority. Labor won 258 seats, Liberal Democrats won 57, and smaller parties took the rest.

Still, Mr. Cameron’s negotiators have pledged to “go the extra mile” to strike an agreement that would return the Conservatives to power for the first time since 1997.

Liberal Democrat lawmaker Roger Roberts said a decision on the Conservative offer would be made at a party meeting later Tuesday, and it was not certain the Liberal Democrats would accept.

“If necessary, we go into this alliance, but we must get electoral reform and a good package for the economy,” he told the BBC.

Conservative negotiator William Hague, Mr. Cameron’s de facto deputy, said Tuesday that a deal between his party and Mr. Clegg’s group was the only credible outcome.

“There should be a government with a strong and secure majority in the House of Commons,” Mr. Hague said.

Conservative lawmaker Nigel Evans told Sky News that his colleagues had been put on standby for their own meeting tonight.

“I can only assume that a deal looks as if it has been done and not been done with the Labor Party,” he said.

Amid the political maneuvering, one thing is certain: The career of Mr. Brown — the Treasury chief who waited a decade in the wings for his chance to become prime minister — is ending.

Mr. Brown accepted blame Monday for Labor’s loss of 91 seats in last week’s election and its failure to win a parliamentary majority. No other party won outright either, resulting in the first “hung Parliament” since 1974.

“As leader of my party, I must accept that that is a judgment on me,” Mr. Brown said Monday, offering to step down before the Labor Party conference in September.

Financial markets kept a close watch on developments. The British pound, which had traded as low as $1.472, had risen by more than 1 cent against the dollar to $1.4957 Tuesday afternoon.

Associated Press Writers Paisley Dodds, Jennifer Quinn, Raphael G. Satter, Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka in London and Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin contributed to this report.