Shadow Attorney General Mark Pettingill told the House of Assembly he believed "dissatisfied members of the PLP" were behind the motion to have a vote of no confidence in the Premier.

He said he would have drafted a motion of censure against Ewart Brown but his perception was that the motion for a vote of no confidence put forward by Opposition leader Kim Swan actually came from Government rebels.

"My perception is that the instigation of the original motion was by dissatisfied people in the PLP who wanted to take out their own Premier and that's why we ended up with the motion that we did as opposed to a censureship motion and then it's run from there."

Dr. Brown left the Lower Chamber as Mr. Pettingill made his remarks, shortly before 2 a.m. on Saturday during a marathon debate in the UBP-tabled motion 'that this honourable House has no confidence in the Government led by the Premier'.

The UBP politician said he didn't believe that anyone should ask someone to do something they wouldn't do themselves — be it the US asking Bermuda to take former Guantánamo Bay prisoners or PLP MPs asking their political rivals to oust their own party leader.

"It takes a lot of guts to talk the talk," he said. "I commend honourable members of the Government who stood up and talked the talk tonight and chastised their own Premier."

Some had shown "testicular fortitude", he said, by standing up and telling the Premier they disagreed with what he did.

But he added that the motion for a vote of no confidence was doomed to fail. "It's been fixed and we all know that the people who were talking the talk, that had the guts to talk the talk, are not going to have the guts to walk the walk because of how it appears it will flow out."

He said he believed that those in the PLP who tried to use the Opposition to help them get rid of a Premier they didn't approve of would ultimately "scurry away" from backing the motion.

They were members of the party, he claimed, who had been unable to achieve what they wanted in the PLP caucus so decided to "rope in" the Opposition and try to achieve the same goal in the House of Assembly.

Mr. Pettingill told the House it had been a week of "spins and twists and turns and subplots and marches and counter marches and comments and all kinds of things".

The Shadow Justice Minister said the decision taken on the Uighurs was simply a matter of law and that there was no question that the Premier and Immigration Minister David Burch "got it wrong".

He added that there was no way that four men who were not Commonwealth citizens could gain Bermudian status and that the decision to bring them here was unconstitutional.

"The whole thing, let's face it, has turned into a bit of a mess," said Mr. Pettingill, adding that the law was simple enough to interpret. He said he was astounded that Government MPs would stand up to laud their party's achievements during the current "crisis".