HIS decision makes him one of the first high-profile male politicians to resign a key position citing work-life balance.

But last night Glasgow MP Tom Harris admitted that the decision to stand down from Labour's frontbench team had been a difficult one.

Saying he wanted to spend more time with his family, the Labour figure said "everyone who has kids makes sacrifices".

"I love politics and I came into politics to be a minister," he told The Herald. "The realisation that that now is not going to happen again is hard but also fine."

Mr Harris, who stood down as part of Labour's shadow environment, food and rural affairs team, said that things might have been different had his young children, two boys aged seven and nine, been older.

Mr Harris, who stood to be Scottish Labour leader in 2011, said that he had always tried to prioritise family life on the days when he was in Glasgow.

He said that he had always been strict about the impact his frontbench job had, but as he looked forward to Labour's campaign to win the next General Election that stance would be unsustainable.

"It's not that in the last year that I have been spending less time with my family.

"I was determined to take the boys to school, I was determined not to work at weekends.

"But I could see that in the next two years shadow ministers are going to have to take on more work and I viewed that with some trepidation."

But Mr Harris, who also has a grown up son from his first marriage, said that he was not a "reformer" and was not making a call for the Commons to change.

And he said that he had no intention of giving up his job as the MP for Glasgow South.

"Being an MP is fine, we have managed to make that work for us. I just found it difficult to balance the front bench job."

He praised Ed Miliband who he said had been "lovely" when he broke the news.

And he said he thought his wife, Carolyn, was "quite pleased".

"She made quite clear that she was not putting pressure on me to do this. She was coping relatively well. But I think she would probably admit that she is quite happy to have the pressure off me".

Mr Harris served as a transport minister under Tony Blair but was sacked in 2008.

Last year he was forced to resign as Scottish Labour's media adviser after he posted a parody of the Hitler film "Downfall" making fun at Alex Salmond.

He is not the first MP to make a similar decision.

Last year Tory MP Louise Mensch announced that she was leaving Westminster because she had found it impossible to combine the job of MP with her family life.

She later moved to New York to join her husband.

A Labour spokesman said that there were no immediate plans to replace Mr Harris on the frontbench.