Wendy Alexander became the first serving party leader in Britain to be suspended from parliament yesterday, after MSPs decided that she should be barred for a day for breaching Holyrood rules.

The Parliament's watchdog Standards Committee agreed by 4 votes to 3 that the leader of the Scottish Labour Party should face sanctions for failing to declare donations to her leadership campaign.

It decided, however, that a one-day suspension - a less serious penalty than had been expected - was adequate punishment. It means that Ms Alexander has survived her

latest political crisis, although her leadership has, inevitably, been weakened further.

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Ms Alexander will be excluded from all proceedings of the Parliament on a Wednesday, soon after MSPs return from the summer recess, allowing her to take part as normal in questions to the First Minister the following day.

The committee split along major party lines with three Nationalist MSPs voting for sanctions to be applied aginst Ms Alexander and the two Labour MSPs opposing sanctions. However, one Liberal Democrat MSP, Hugh O'Donnell, voted with the Nationalists while the solitary Conservative on the committee backed the Labour position.

The one-day suspension probably allows Ms Alexander to relax for the moment, since it is not enough to provoke a full-blown and possibly terminal crisis for her leadership of Labour north of the Border. If she had been suspended for a week or more, it was widely felt at Holyrood that she would not have survived such a punishment and would have had to put her party interests before her own and stand down.

The relatively minor nature of the penalty will be an immediate relief to Gordon Brown, who has long been a political patron of Ms Alexander and backed her for the leadership when it fell vacant last autumn after Labour lost the Scottish election to the SNP.

The Prime Minister will be happy that, despite the embarrassment of having a party leader suspended from Parliament even for one day, he will almost certainly not have to face the difficulty of a Scottish leadership crisis at Holyrood on top of the sea of troubles engulfing him at Westminster.

The decision of the standards committee now goes to the full Parliament for ratification and it may be that there will be an attempt by Labour and some Liberal Democrats to overturn yesterday's committee decision.

The view of the four members of the committee who voted for sanctions to be taken against her was that there were “mitigating circumstances”, allowing them to water down the punishment.

There was intense speculation among MSPs last night that Ms Alexander's political bacon had been saved by the Nationalists only because they believe that she helps their cause and want to keep her in place in view of her poor poll ratings. In a recent survey, 60 per cent of Scots said that Ms Alexander was doing a poor job as Scottish Labour leader.

A spokesman for Ms Alexander said that she noted the committee's decision and pointed out that she had acted on “unambiguous written advice from the Parliament's clerks” on whether or not she should register the donations.

The spokesman added: “This is the first time ever that the Standards Commissioner has disagreed on a point of law with the Parliament's lawyers and it has profound implications for all MSPs.”

There was also puzzlement and some anger among some MSPs that Ms Alexander had been suspended only for a day when other backbench MSPs have been suspended in the past for a week for what are widely viewed as less serious breaches of the MSPs'code of conduct, provoking claims of “one law for party leaders and another for backbenchers”.

The standards committee delivered its judgment on the sanction against Ms Alexander 24 hours after its members agreed with the view of Dr Jim Dyer, the Parliament's Standards Commissioner. He had judged that Ms Alexander had broken the rules by not registering about £10,000 in donations to her campaign last year.

This episode is the latest episode in what has been a tumultuous year for Ms Alexander. She has already undergone an Electoral Commission probe into her campaign finances and was on the verge of standing down last December after it emerged that she had had a £950 illegal donation from the Jersey-based businessman Paul Green.

She avoided criminal prosecution and claimed that she had been exonerated when the Commission delivered a qualified verdict of not guilty.

A parallel inquiry by Dr Dyer followed after complaints that she had failed to register other donations and the matter was referred to the Procurator Fiscal, in Edinburgh, who decided to take no action.

Dr Dyer's inquiry, however, continued and his report to the Standards Committee triggered this week's events after he decided that her failure to register the donations amounted to a clear breach of the Parliament's regulations.

Ms Alexander's defence throughout has been that she took advice from clerks to the standards committee on whether she should register the donations and that they told her there was no need to do so.

However, critics point out that she sought that advice only in November last year, two months after the first donation and not within the 30 days laid down in the Holyrood rule book.

A source close to Alex Salmond, the First Minister, said that Ms Alexander now had “the worst of both worlds” in that she had had sanctions imposed on her but these were not of a sufficient magnitude to force her to resign. “She is badly wounded”, said the source.

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