A senior Conservative has filed a formal complaint about Lord Archer to the party's new ethics and integrity committee, a move which could sabotage the author's hopes of becoming the first elected mayor of London.
It was reported yesterday that Sir Timothy Kitson had written to the Tory chairman, Lord Parkinson, urging an inquiry into whether the novelist-politician is fit to be the Conservative candidate for the new post.
Sir Timothy, former whip and parliamentary private secretary to Sir Edward Heath during his premiership, is said to be concerned by allegations against Lord Archer in a biography of him by BBC journalist Michael Crick, according to the Sunday Telegraph.
A spokesman for the Tory party said they could not comment on a letter which they had not yet received. "When we do receive it, the chairman will give it due consideration."
But the spokesman was keen to stress that integrity was one of the six key principles on which the party leader, Mr William Hague, has said the future of the Conservatives would be based.
Lord Archer, a wealthy businessman and novelist, has been involved in various causes celebres over the years, including a case in which a prostitute claimed he had paid her off at Victoria Station in London, and a Department of Trade and Industry investigation in 1994 after he bought shares in Anglia television, of which his wife, Mary, was a non-executive director.
Mr Hague was guarded when asked about Sir Timothy's letter. The party had machinery to deal with such allegations but it would be wrong to prejudge that procedure, he said.
"I have set up a powerful committee, an ethics and integrity committee . . . because I'm determined that never again will the name of the Conservative Party be blackened by one candidate being guilty of some gross misconduct," the Tory leader said in a reference to some of the sensational "sleaze" stories of recent years.
Mr Hague said: "I'm not trying to set up a system where anybody who wants to be a Conservative candidate, immediately the ethics and integrity committee has to look into them.
"But if things are brought to the attention of the board, and they are actually substantial allegations, then they would refer them to the ethics and integrity committee," he told BBC 1's Breakfast with Frost.