A vice-president of Mr Iain Duncan Smith's Tory leadership campaign team with close links to the far-right British National Party has been sacked from the leadership campaign team.
Mr Edgar Griffin, a campaign vice president Wales, is the father of BNP chairman Mr Nick Griffin. His wife Jean stood for the party against Mr Duncan Smith in the last election.
The disclosure is an embarrassment to the Duncan Smith campaign which has had to fend off charges of extremism from supporters of Mr Kenneth Clarke.
Once the BNP links of 79-year-old Mr Griffin became known, the vice president of the Montgomeryshire Conservative Association was sacked within the hour.
He had he was prepared to resign to avoid causing further embarrassment to Mr Duncan Smith.
However, this morning he said he still wants to carry on distributing his campaign literature.
He said that he had been told by party officials in Wales that there was "no problem whatsoever" and was "flabbergasted" by the controversy he had caused.
"How can they say I am an infiltrator? I have been in the Conservative Party since 1948 and I have virtually never been out of office in that time," he said.
PA