The Conservatives were last night accused of perpetrating "a scandalous outrage" after their refusal to drop their opposition to the government's European Elections Bill effectively killed off plans to conduct next year's contest under proportional representation.
As a bitter war of words raged throughout Westminster following the House of Lord's fifth rejection of the government Bill - enabling people to vote for parties under a "closed list" system - the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, conceded he would be forced to revert to first-past-the-post for the elections next June.
The government signalled its determination to reintroduce the Bill in the new parliamentary session which opens next week. Ministers will invoke the seldom-used Parliament Act to overrule the Lords. But Mr Blair said Mr William Hague's determination to continue his opposition to the principle of the Bill meant the legislation could not reach the Statute Book in time for the June poll.
"If they play that game we have got to go back to the old system," said Mr Blair. "They can use the Tory majority they have got in the House of Lords to scupper us, and that is what they have done."
That was a bitter blow for the Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Paddy Ashdown - already under pressure from colleagues troubled about his closeness to Mr Blair, and his failure to secure a guaranteed referendum on electoral reform for Westminster before the next election. Mr Ashdown declared: "The Conservative Party's use of hereditary peers to overturn the wishes of the British people - two-thirds of whom voted in the last general election - is a scandalous outrage which all people who value democracy will work together to oppose."
The Liberal Democrats stand to be the biggest losers after the failure of the reform proposal, although Mr Blair mocked the Conservative leadership for a decision which will almost certainly diminish Mr Hague's hopes for significant gains at Labour's expense.
Mr Blair and his ministers are determined that the Conservatives will live to regret their decision to overturn a decision of the elected chamber implementing, in terms, the government's election manifesto commitment.
Obviously relishing the parliamentary battle to come over the government's plan to strip hereditary peers of their voting rights, the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, described the result as "a victory for the kamikaze tendency of the Tory party". Alleging that Mr Hague had effectively overruled Viscount Cranborne, the Tory leader in the Lords, Mr Straw said: "Despite earlier confusion, he is now saying they will continue to use hereditary peers to frustrate the will of the House of Commons on this issue. The Tories will rue the day they overreached themselves in this way."
Dr Jack Cunningham, Mr Blair's cabinet "enforcer", waded in, accusing the Tories of "schoolboy shenanigans" and the result "a constitutional outrage".
Mr Hague was unrepentant, accusing the government of performing "a spectacular U-turn" by proceeding with the Bill in the new session, having earlier indicated that it might not.
He repeated his criticism of the "closed list" system, by which people would vote for parties rather than for individual candidates and suggested an open list system by which people could choose between various party nominees. "We say it [the closed list system] is wrong, that it is undemocratic, and that that has never been the way of doing things in this country."