On Monday evening the Labour Member of Parliament for Inverclyde David Cairns sadly passed away after a short illness. Cairns was admitted to hospital in March with acute pancreatitis. Aged just 44 his death is a huge shock and we offer our condolences to his family and friends.
Cairns was first elected in 2001 having already won his first political battle. As an ordained Catholic Priest an ancient law would have barred him from taking up his seat if he was successful in his bid to become the MP for Greenock & Inverclyde, as the seat was known then. Just before Parliament was dissolved a bill was passed to revoke the act that would disqualify Cairns. He went on to easily win the safe Labour seat.
During his time as an MP Cairns successfully championed a bill to prevent shop workers being forced to work against their will on Sundays. He went on to became a junior minister in the Scottish Office in 2005 but he resigned in 2008 as he was unable to publicly support Gordon Brown. You can find fuller obituaries on all the newspaper's websites and many political blogs. Our personal recommendation would be the Glasgow South MP, and good friend of David Cairns, Tom Harris', which you can find here.
There will be a by-election for the Inverclyde constituency in due course which will be covered on this website. However, it doesn't seem quite right to start talking about the political fallout after just 48 hours; we'll come back to this in a week or so.
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