Labour MP Anne Moffat may be deselected tonight after feud with officials

A sitting Labour MP is expected to be deselected by her own local party members tonight, after tensions over her style erupted into a bitter, public feud with senior constituency officials. Hundreds of party activists and members are expected to vote in person this evening at a special meeting to decide whether they want Anne Moffat to stand again as Labour's candidate for East Lothian, a seat she has held since 2001. Moffat, a former lay president of the trade union Unison and granddaughter of a famous Scottish miners' leader, is set to lose the vote, after four of the area's six party branches called for her to stand down in January. The Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, who represents the same constituency in the Holyrood parliament, has failed to back her in public. However, several informed sources suggest Moffat could narrowly survive: she is rumoured to have hired a coach to bus supporters to the meeting in the market town of Haddington, while her opponents have also organised transport for their supporters. The vote, which threatens to seriously damage Labour's efforts to hold the seat, is the culmination of a long-running dispute within the constituency party about Moffat's track record and her style as an MP. That row led to the constituency party being formally suspended by Labour's ruling national executive committee in 2008, after an earlier deselection bid by a majority of the six local branches failed when the unions voted to retain her as Labour's candidate. The result of tonight's vote will go to the NEC in London, which is expected to order an urgent reselection contest, if she loses, when it meets later next week. There is speculation she is planning to stand down on health grounds if she is defeated. Moffat has accused senior party officials of "bullying and intimidation", while her critics claim she has failed to do her job adequately, failed to attend party meetings and neglected her duties. Willie Innes, the chairman of East Lothian constituency Labour party, and four other local officials, recently wrote to the press calling for Moffat to stand aside for the good of the party. "Prolonging this matter is damaging and harmful to the party and our election prospects," they stated. A former nurse, Moffat has countered by claiming the party has ignored her medical condition, after she had a brain haemorrhage last year. She wrote to the party to say doctors had advised her not to "engage in any activity which would cause stress and anxiety". Moffat was unavailable for comment today, but attacked her critics in an interview with the BBC, claiming her recovery "has been hampered by their bad feelings, and viciousness and vindictiveness of those people who even when I was seriously ill, didn't let up". Labour is defending a nominally strong 7,600-vote majority in East Lothian, but that has been halved since the previous sitting MP John Home Robertson stood down before the 2001 general election, to focus on his career in the Scottish parliament. The Scottish Liberal Democrats are pressing hard to take the seat. Moffat's period as an MP has been dogged by controversy. She quickly fell out with Home Robertson after allegedly interfering in his constituency concerns, fought off allegations of an affair with a fellow Labour MP, came bottom of a table of MPs ranked by the number of their Commons speeches, and endured a sacking row with a senior member of her constituency staff. Moffat was involved in one of the first controversies over the suppression of MPs' expenses. In 2007, a two-year battle by a Green party activist under freedom of information legislation finally led to the release of Moffat's £40,000 travel claims in 2004, then the most of any MP at Westminster.