The Conservative Party in Britain was engulfed in an historic split last night after the party leader, Mr William Hague, was forced to sack Lord Cranborne, his leader in the House of Lords, over an unauthorised, backstairs deal with Labour over abolition of hereditary voting rights which went spectacularly wrong.
Mr Hague revealed the plan - which would have allowed nearly 100 of the 759 hereditary peers to stay on until a fully-reformed upper house is established - in dramatic exchanges across the Commons dispatch box with Prime Minister Mr Blair. Only a handful of key players on either side had known about it.
Mr Hague then faced a revolt by Conservative peers who backed Lord Cranborne's deal by 80 votes to 20 despite their leader's plea for a principled stand over Lords reform. At an emergency shadow cabinet meeting, he promptly sacked Lord Cranborne for what the peer admitted had been "going behind his back" to Number 10 for three weeks of talks.
Mr Hague, who only learned the extent of Lord Cranborne's double-dealing yesterday morning, immediately asked to address the weekly meeting of backbench Tory MPs 30 minutes later. MPs endorsed Mr Hague's position even more emphatically than astonished peers had rejected it.
It confirmed a split which, some MPs predicted last night, could either finally ruin the Conservative Party or set it on the road to modernisation, free of centuries of elitist privilege. "This is the way William wants to take us," one Hague-ite insisted. It remains a huge gamble with his authority.
Mr Hague's fragile leadership is not under threat - unless the crisis deepens. It was not clear last night how badly he had miscalculated - hoping for a Labour split on the issue - or whether the Labour plan may yet prevail. Lord Cranborne's front bench team in the Lords offered to resign en bloc in his support.
Even loyal Tory MPs were dismayed. "It's a catastrophe, the end of the party as we now know it," said one. "Blair has played it brilliantly, he's captured our cavalry," conceded another. "Cranborne's behaviour has been unforgivably arrogant," said a third. Most backed Mr Hague's stance while Tory peers called it "a disastrous miscalculation".
In the pandemonium which followed the wholly unexpected crisis it emerged that Lord Cranborne, a cabinet ally of the former prime minister, Mr John Major, and whose family has engaged in high Westminster politics for 400 years, had deliberately defied the inner shadow cabinet's rejection of Labour's compromise offer.
Weeks after being told by Mr Hague that the proposal drafted by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, was unacceptable, Lord Cranborne tried to bounce his party into accepting it by enlisting the support of senior cross-bench peers and hereditary Tory peers who saw it as a lifeline to save them from extinction.
At the heart of the row was a pragmatic compromise thrashed out behind-the- scenes between Mr Blair, Lord Cranborne, Lord Irvine and Baroness Jay, new Labour Leader in the Lords, that would have smoothed the passage of the Lords reform bill in return for guaranteeing a short reprieve from Death Row for 91 hereditary peers.
The 91 would be elected by their own parties in proportion to their current strength, 42 Tories, 28 cross-benchers, two Labour and three Lib Dems.
The Tory ability to put up a strong resistance to the Government's plans to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers must now be in doubt.
Downing Street, which knew it was open to criticism for striking a deal that would preserve peers, justified its position last night by saying the pact could speed up the whole Lords reform process. The Tory split left only a few Labour MPs outraged. Most were gleeful at their party's coup.