Premier Dr. Ewart Brown's decision to halt debate on the Government bill which would have allowed gambling on cruise ships in port can only be seen as a worrying personal defeat; perhaps the most severe since he became leader of the Progressive Labour Party.

Rising to report progress, as Dr. Brown did on Wednesday, is a technical parliamentary term which means that, in theory, you can return to debate the bill at a later time. But the parliamentary convention usually is that the legislation is dead.

That Dr. Brown decided to end the debate on Wednesday without a vote means that he believed that the bill was headed for defeat.

Opposition United Bermuda Party MPs were against the bill while enough Progressive Labour Party MPs had spoken against it and would either have voted against it or absented themselves from the House that it would have been defeated.

While Dr. Brown did lift the whip on the issue and made it a free vote for his MPs, it is likely he did this from a position of weakness rather than because he genuinely felt this was purely a conscience question. And the reality is that this was a Government bill drafted to meet a commitment Dr. Brown had made as Tourism Minister.

So this can be seen as a defeat for Dr. Brown, and it is the worst he has suffered since he ousted Alex Scott as leader.

Apart from Mr. Scott, former Cabinet Ministers Wayne Perinchief and Patrice Minors spoke against the bill as well, and with two MPs, Ashfield DeVent and Dennis Lister missing, the bill was clearly in jeopardy.

There is no doubt that many of these MPs feel strongly about gambling, which is an issue that divides both parties. But it seems to be a more difficult issue for the PLP, which has historically been against it. Dr. Brown seems to be on the wrong side of the issue with the majority of his party.

However, this newspaper has long warned that Dr. Brown's well earned reputation, in the words of Renee Webb, for using people and kicking them to the kerb would come back to haunt him. The fact that the Government backbench is made up almost largely of former Ministers is always dangerous; Dr. Brown need only speak to former Premier Sir John Swan about that. Now it has flexed its muscles.

It would be dangerous to overstate the importance of this. There is still much more that unites the parliamentary group than divides it, and apart from the coups against Dame Jennifer Smith and Mr. Scott (in both of which Dr. Brown was a prime mover), the PLP parliamentary group has been extremely disciplined. And whether this was by choice or necessity, the fact is that this was a free vote. Breaking the whip is much harder.

The PLP has probably not quite reached the point that the United Bermuda Party did in the mid-1990s when it fell into open warfare over first Independence and then McDonald's.

But it has been shown that Dr. Brown cannot reliably deliver his majority, and that should worry him. All of this has also taken place against the backdrop of the row over the Auditor General's report, in which Dr. Brown and Works Minister Derrick Burgess have had little public support from their colleagues, despite or perhaps because of their vehement attacks on the report's author.

In the short term, this is a major embarrassment for Dr. Brown, who has failed to deliver a commitment to the cruise lines who he says agreed to come back to Bermuda in return for this concession among others. For a politician who relies heavily on his reputation for getting things done, this is a significant setback, and his anger on Wednesday night reflects that.

It is hard to know what he can do now. He has shown a ruthless management streak in the past, but there is not much you can do to MPs whom you have already sacked from the Cabinet. And, like other strong leaders, humbling himself before these MPs to get them back onside just isn't Dr. Brown's style.