Ashdown facing internal conflict

PADDY ASHDOWN faces a showdown with his party's grassroots on Monday over the agreement he struck with Tony Blair to bring Labour and the Liberal Democrats closer together.

The Liberal Democrats ruling body, its federal executive, will give Mr Ashdown a rough ride when he appeals for its support for his decision to extend the remit of the cabinet committee that includes senior Liberal Democrats. "There will be blood on the carpet," one insider said.

Some grassroots Liberal Democrat activists are considering a plan to call a special party conference, which they believe would reject the agreement, possibly provoking Mr Ashdown to resign.

The fears that Mr Ashdown is "cosying up" too closely to Mr Blair will be heightened by today's news that Labour's Millbank headquarters is setting up a special "dirty tricks" unit to combat the Liberal Democrats. An internal Labour document, which has been leaked to The Independent, reveals that party officials are being asked to gather "inside information" on the Lib-Dems to be stored on the controversial Millbank computer database, called Excalibur.

Critics of Mr Ashdown's move to forge closer links with the Government intend to raise the document as evidence of Mr Blair's "hypocrisy" over relations with their party.

"His control freaks at Millbank are out of control - now they want to snoop on us, control us and kill us off," said one senior Liberal Democrat.

Even before Labour's move was revealed, Mr Ashdown faced big problems persuading his party executive to endorse extending the work of the cabinet committee from constitutional reform to other areas.

Donnachadh McCarthy, a member of the executive, accused Mr Ashdown of breaking the party's rules by agreeing his joint statement with Mr Blair without consulting his party. "It is a betrayal of everything that Mr Ashdown ever said he stood for," said Mr McCarthy. "It is a betrayal of pluralist politics and a three-party system."

At Monday's meeting, Mr Ashdown is expected to adopt the "back me or sack me" approach he had to deploy on Wednesday night at a heated gathering of his MPs.

Allies believe he will win a vote of confidence but claim that he would not lose too much sleep if he was forced to resign over the issue.

Wednesday's meeting went on for three-and-a-half hours, with many of the 37 MPs who spoke expressing their anger about the agreement. Several complained they were being "bounced" into accepting it while others said the Liberal Democrats would be prevented from criticising government policies on health, education, welfare and Europe. "There was a lot of anger; people didn't pull their punches," one MP said.

However, Mr Ashdown gradually won round most rebels by promising that the MPs would have to approve talks with the Government on specific policy issues. Some dissidents were reassured by his optimism that Mr Blair would endorse electoral reform.

After winning the backing of his "shadow cabinet" yesterday, Mr Ashdown sought to calm his party's nerves by putting a very different gloss on the agreement to Downing Street. He stressed that further co-operation with the Government would be in "tightly defined and carefully controlled areas".

The Cabinet endorsed the new deal yesterday but Mr Blair had problems on his backbenches too. Lynne Jones, chairman of the left-wing Campaign group of MPs, said that the Labour leadership's first loyalty should be to its members and MPs and it should not forge alliances without consulting them.