The Government will stand publicly alongside the cricket authorities in banning Zimbabwe from touring England next year in protest at the Mugabe regime, The Times was told last night.

Gordon Brown and Andy Burnham, the Sport Secretary, will make plain that they are against the tour and that it should not go ahead. “We will not leave the ECB in the lurch and expect them to take the responsibility,” a source close to the Prime Minister said. “We will talk to them over the next few weeks over how this is done, but we are against it and the world will know we are against it.”

The Government is likely to discuss procedure for calling off the tour, including compensation that the authorities would have to pay for cancelling one-day fixtures under ICC rules. There would be no penalty for scrapped Tests; Zimbabwe is no longer classified as a Test-playing nation.

The source was effectively contradicting Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office Minister, who caused consternation in the ECB on Tuesday after telling the House of Lords that the decision to call off the tour, which involves two Tests and three one-day matches, was a decision for the board and that it was not for the Government directly to intervene.

Senior government sources said last night that the minister was giving the legalistic Foreign Office position, but the practical position was that the Prime Minister did not want the tour to go ahead and would not shelter behind the ECB. “They want the cricketing world to know where we as a Government stand and we will make that clear,” the source said.

The decision has implications for the ICC World Twenty20 tournament, which is scheduled to be held in England later in 2009.

England went ahead with a tour to Zimbabwe four years ago, after the ICC threatened the ECB with large fines if the team pulled out. Tony Blair said that he was opposed but was powerless to stop it because it was a matter for the cricket authorities. The government source told The Times: “That is not going to happen this time.”