Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists last night demanded the resignation of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, as they stepped up the row over what they dubbed the "cash for wigs" affair.
The Conservative Party chairman, Mr Michael Ancram, said Lord Irvine had "damaged the integrity" of his office after it was revealed he had invited Labour-supporting lawyers to donate at least £200 a head at a fund-raising dinner to help secure a second Labour term.
The leader of the Scottish National Party, Mr John Swinney, backed the resignation call, claiming the Lord Chancellor had placed the lawyers under "intolerable political pressure".
Mr Swinney said: "The man responsible for making judicial appointments should not be going cap in hand to the candidates for these positions demanding a minimum contribution of £200 for new Labour. It is now impossible for Derry Irvine to maintain his independence and he should go."
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said Mr Blair would treat the resignation calls "with the contempt they deserved", as Labour spokesmen insisted all those invited to the dinner had previously expressed support for the party.
Mr Ancram told BBC radio: "The triple role of the Lord Chancellor works well as long as there is a clear understanding that when he is acting in his legal capacity as head of the judiciary . . . he is acting in an impartial and non-partisan way. That's clearly been breached here. It's for that reason that it's now damaging his office and he should resign."
The Tory chairman continued: "When he is dealing with lawyers over whom he has enormous powers of patronage in the future, when he is eventually going to decide who become judges, when he is in a sense the custodian of the independence of our judiciary, then he has to be clearly non-political. He has stepped over that line."
Mr Blair's spokesman shrugged off the charges, saying: "This is exactly the sort of issue that the opposition and parts of the media prefer to focus on as it avoids real debate on policy and the issues that matter to people in this country."
However, leading QC Mr Anthony Scrivener, who had previously donated to Labour, repeated his claim that such a thing had never happened "in the hundreds of years of the office", saying it was "blindingly obvious" that Lord Irvine should not have been engaged in this type of fund-raising.
The Law Society, meanwhile, called for the establishment of an independent commission to oversee judicial appointments and so eliminate fears of patronage.