Joanna Lumley completed her rout of the Government yesterday as she emerged from a meeting with Gordon Brown committing the Prime Minister to “do the right thing” by the Gurkhas.

The actress bound Mr Brown with words of praise after he finally agreed to meet the campaigner for full residency rights for Nepalese soldiers who have served in the Army.

Mr Brown suffered a humiliating defeat last week when the Commons rejected rules set out last month that sought significantly to curtail eligibility.

“I trust him. I rely on him. And I know that he has now taken this matter into his own hands and so today is a very good day,” Ms Lumley said after her half-hour encounter.

Having rallied a majority of the Commons, and at least one member of the Royal Family, to her cause, Ms Lumley was gracious in victory. “The meeting was extremely positive. He is wholly supportive of the Gurkha cause. He is going to come up with a new solution by the end of this month,” she said.

Downing Street confirmed later that Mr Brown had agreed to consider her demand that all Gurkhas, regardless of length or time of service, be eligible for full residency rights together with their immediate families. Ministers are considering setting a two-year deadline before which all applications from Gurkhas will be allowed, The Times has learnt.

Ms Lumley said she accepted that Mr Brown would have to deal with the issue “slowly and deliberately” but added that his commitment to bring forward the processing of all outstanding applications from July to May had shown “a huge intent and purpose”.

She said: “He promised he would do all he can . . . I do trust the Prime Minister. I know him very slightly personally and I find him to be a man of integrity.

“I think this is now in his hands. It has been in many people’s hands. It has been bandied around from the Ministry of Defence to the Home Office, and all kinds of different people have been dealing with it. Now I feel we have got the head man, the man at the top, the leader of our entire nation, and I feel absolutely confident he is going to do the right thing for the Gurkhas.”

Ms Lumley said that some “wild figures” had been bandied about concerning the cost of allowing the Gurkhas to settle — which the Prime Minister last week put at £1.4 billion.

Her meeting was arranged after she told MPs that she had written three letters to Mr Brown about the issue that were not acknowledged, something Downing Street denies. It took place soon after Mr Brown was pressed at Prime Minister’s Questions by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader. Asked whether he felt that the Government was bound by that vote, Mr Brown said simply that it would “listen to the voice of the House as it was expressed last Wednesday. We are speeding up the 1,500 applications and hope to have them completed by the end of May. We are looking at the judicial reviews as a matter of urgency and will complete this work very soon.”

Speaking after the Prime Minister’s meeting with Ms Lumley, Mr Duncan Smith told BBC News: “I asked the Prime Minister today a very straightforward question . . . he was all over the place and I understand he has not given an absolute answer to Joanna Lumley.

“I’m not in a position of trusting anybody any more in this game because they have been spun from start to finish. The answer is very simple: at some stage the Government is going to have to say, ‘We accept the will of the House and now we will simply make the legislation and do all the relevant things that allow the Gurkhas to settle here’.”

Keith Vaz, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, which has called for universal settlement rights for Gurkhas, blamed Cabinet infighting between the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the Defence Secretary, John Hutton, for the humiliating Commons defeat.

In a separate article for Progress magazine about the lost vote, Mr Vaz said: “I felt that the whole issue was mishandled.”

Ms Lumley refused to say which senior Royal Family member had sent her a letter indicating support for her campaign. “I will never tell any of you. I have actually never told anybody who it is and I won’t,” she said. Asked if it was the Prince of Wales, who is Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Gurkha Rifles, she replied: “No it wasn’t.”

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