After years of infighting, the East Lothian MP is deselected after a vote by local party members

A sitting Labour MP has been deselected by her local party members after tensions over her style erupted into a public feud with senior constituency officials.

With only weeks to go before the general election, Anne Moffat has been sacked as Labour's candidate for East Lothian, a seat she has held for nine years, after a special meeting of her local constituency party tonight.

Nearly 200 members, approximately half the local party, took part and voted for a special resolution to deselect her by 130 to 59 – a heavier margin than her supporters expected. The meeting heard her pleas to be kept on in silence.

Moffat, a former president of the trade union Unison and granddaughter of a famous Scottish miners leader, has until 5pm on Monday to appeal to Labour's ruling national executive committee.

If she accepts the result, an all-women shortlist will be drawn up urgently to contest the seat. There is speculation she may now retire on health grounds.

The vote comes after four years of infighting between Moffat and senior party activists in East Lothian – a constituency shared by the current Labour leader in the Scottish parliament, Iain Gray. He has repeatedly refused to back her.

Complaints about her track record and her style as MP has twice led to four out of the area's six Labour party branches asking her to stand down. Moffat has relied heavily on a union block vote for her survival, and the feuding led to the formal suspension of the constituency party by the NEC in 2008.

Harry Cairney, one of her leading critics and the chairman of Prestonpans Labour club, one of the largest in Scotland, said that despite the deep split within the party the meeting had been "conciliatory and business-like."

Cairney said: "People have waited three years to get this vote and people said three years ago when she couldn't carry a majority of the branches they should have their say."

Moffat left without speaking to the media. She had 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.

Moffat was involved in the first controversy over the suppression of information about MPs expenses by the Commons authorities.

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 from 2004 – then the highest of any MP at Westminster.

A former nurse, she 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."

In an earlier interview with the BBC, she attacked her critics, 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 and their candidate, Stuart Ritchie, said after the vote: "Labour are going to parachute in a candidate, who probably won't know or understand the issues the people of East Lothian face every day.

They'll just parrot Labour's tired old lines.

"It doesn't matter to the people of East Lothian who the Labour candidate is. Because whoever they end up with, Labour are falling apart here."

Moffat's period as 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.

• Labour
• Scotland
• MPs' expenses