David Burt has revealed his long-term intentions for the leadership of the Progressive Labour Party.

“There is no vacancy in the leadership at this time, so it’s not something to discuss,” he told The Royal Gazette during an exclusive interview. “But if there was a vacancy, I could certainly see myself putting my name forward.”

Mr Burt said he is enjoying the challenge of being acting Opposition leader while Marc Bean is on medical leave in the wake of suffering a stroke and has been working hard to get the party ready for the next General Election.

In a wide-ranging interview at the Opposition leader’s office, the shadow finance minister also spoke about his vision for the economy, his opposition to same-sex marriage and civil unions, the need for immigration and education reform, and how to tackle the scourge of the island’s young black men killing one another.

He could not say when Mr Bean would return from medical leave, but insisted that there was “no pressure inside the party” for him to come back before he was ready.

“When he is prepared to return, he’ll return,” Mr Burt said. “On certain issues, we may casually speak, but, by and large, the [party] constitution grants the acting leader complete powers of the party leader in his absence.

“He’s on medical leave and, as a party, we respect his privacy and his medical leave, and I’m sure that at the point in time when he is able to return, he shall.”

The PLP is not due to hold a leadership election until October 2018.

But Mr Bean’s ill health and the mass resignation of seven of his shadow cabinet last December, including public criticism of him by outgoing shadow tourism minister Zane DeSilva, sparked speculation that his time in charge of the Opposition could be coming to an end. Mr Burt would not comment on Mr Bean’s future; nor would he give a “yes or no” answer when asked if he fully supported the party leader.

He said: “It’s very simple: Marc Bean is the leader of the Progressive Labour Party and as long as Marc Bean is the leader of the Progressive Labour Party, he will continue to retain my support. That’s the most important thing.

“People will always have challenges and when you aren’t able to resolve your challenges internally is when things happen like you saw with MP DeSilva. What’s most important, inside a party or inside any organisation, is that you have things that are in place in order to preserve things because you are going to have conflict internally.

“The sign of a mature organisation and the sign of mature leadership is basically getting past those aspects and moving forward.”

The 37-year-old Pembroke West Central MP insisted that “ambitious” was not the right word to describe him and nor was it correct to assume, as many people do, that he was a protégé of Ewart Brown, simply because he served as PLP chairman when Dr Brown was party leader and premier.

Asked if there was a rift in the party between those who back the former premier and those who do not, he responded: “I don’t think that things in the party are about Dr Brown. Dr Brown hasn’t been party leader since 2010 and being focused on Dr Brown is sometimes misguided and wasted energy. The people of this country want us to focus on the problems which they face on a daily basis.”

Mr Burt said he often told constituents that he felt most despondent about Bermuda’s future on a Friday, when he attended the House of Assembly, owing to the level of debate.

“I love policy a lot more than I love the cut and thrust of politics and I really wish that as a country we would be able to focus more on the solutions that are needed to fix and to heal the country itself.”

He revealed that his brief since taking charge of the Opposition had been to get the party “election-ready” and that it was now “more ready than we were four months ago”.

The resignation of government backbencher Shawn Crockwell will result in the country going to the polls sooner than expected, he predicted.

“The Government’s majority is very tenuous right now; it just is,” he said. “They now have only 18 votes in Parliament which they can count. That means that when we go into committee [and the Deputy Speaker takes the chair], if there is 17 votes against, they can’t pass a Bill out of committee.

“I’m not a constitutional scholar, but if a government reaches a point where they have difficulty passing their legislation, or they can’t put things in place that the government supports, that is a point in time that either they have to consider whether they need to seek a new mandate from the people of this country or whether or not the Governor needs to say that it doesn’t look like the Government continues to command a majority.”

He admitted that although the PLP’s aim, stated in its constitution, was to gain the numbers to form a government in Parliament, it was “hard for people to imagine” Mr Crockwell having an “overnight conversion” and crossing the floor. “We have core principles, which we are committed to, and people should join our party only if they are committed to those core principles,” said Mr Burt, who noted Mr Crockwell’s time as chairman of the United Bermuda Party, the “marriage of convenience” that led to the formation of the One Bermuda Alliance and now, as an independent, the Southampton West Central MP’s “relentless” attacks on the PLP’s term in office.

Still, he added: “The prospect of the defection of Shawn Crockwell makes an early election more likely than it would have been before.”

He said the PLP “owned” its mistakes from its last term in office and had spent the past three years researching policy, formulating specific plans of action and focusing on how to transform the island’s economy.

“We have very sound policies that we spend a lot of time putting together,” Mr Burt said. “Sound policies that we can put to the electorate.

“We continue to do our work in recruiting our candidates and making sure that we keep in touch with the people on the doorstep and we are doing work to make sure we can have the funds in place to compete in an election.”

The divisions that resulted in the shadow cabinet resignations, he said, had “dominated the party’s energy” instead of it being spent on election preparation. But he insisted that had changed. “There is more in common than divides us,” he said. “What you have to remember is that in any political party or in any political organisation, you are always going to have people who have different views. What you will find inside the PLP is there is far more inside of the room that unites us than divides.”