MICHAEL HOWARD’S attempt to blame Labour for Britain’s escalating postal vote scandal backfired last night after leaked documents showed that his own officials had helped to block anti-fraud reforms of the system.

The disclosure prompted John Prescott to denounce the Tory leader’s “breathtaking hypocrisy” for playing politics on an issue where his party had been “actively involved in drawing up the rules”.

The Times has obtained confidential minutes of negotiations between the Electoral Commission and the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties last year over a proposed code of conduct for postal voting.

After weeks of headlines about stolen votes, the latest controversy is about rules allowing parties to collect postal vote application forms and process them at their headquarters.

The leaked minutes show that all three parties had been eager to allow “intermediate handling” by watering down rules preventing them from processing voters’ postal ballot application forms. David Simpson, the Tory legal compliance officer who chaired the meeting, is recorded as stating: “The parties continued to disagree (with the commission) on the appropriateness of using an intermediary address” for handling forms.

The pressure from the three parties resulted in publication this year of a revised code of conduct for this election, allowing parties to send out millions of leaflets to homes with postal vote applications attached. People are asked to send the completed forms on to a party processing centre that will then forward them to returning officers.

This system has been criticised in recent weeks after the postal-fraud scandals involving Labour councillors in Birmingham and Blackburn. But the commission’s original proposal had been designed to reduce the scope for corruption.

The political watchdog had circulated a briefing paper to parties at the meeting which was heavily critical of Conservative attempts to harvest postal votes ahead of last year’s local and European elections.“The Michael Howard campaign situation is aggravated by the party keeping forms for two weeks . . . for screening,” the briefing paper said. There have also been unsubstantiated allegations that delays in processing forms could be used to sieve out applications from people likely to vote for a rival party.

The commission reproduced a letter to the Conservative leader from John Bambrook, the electoral services officer for Peterborough. This said that he was receiving dozens of complaints each day from people about the Tory operation.

At a press conference yesterday Mr Howard said that his party was abiding by rules that were the sole responsibility of the Government. Asked about the practice of parties handling postal vote applications, he said: “The Electoral Commission made recommendations to this Government. This Government should have accepted and put into effect those recommendations. It didn’t. It should be deeply ashamed of that. If there had been a Conservative government the law would have been different.”

Labour is angry that the activities of other parties in alleged voting fraud have been obscured by the high-profile prosecution of its councillors.

The documents leaked to The Times, combined with Mr Howard’s comments yesterday, provoked an explosive response from Mr Prescott. He said: “Michael Howard is once again exposed as the serial opportunist the British public know him to be. But this time his hypocrisy is breathtaking because his party team was actively involved in drawing up the current rules.”

A senior Tory source accepted that Mr Simpson had chaired the meeting on May 18, 2004, but denied that the Conservatives had led opposition to the guidance, saying that all three parties wanted to use intermediate addresses.

Since then the Electoral Commission has drawn up new “compromise” guidelines that allow parties to use intermediate addresses provided they forward postal vote applications within two days.

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