His speech last week received a less than glowing endorsement from John Redwood on Friday. But it has not, outside the ranks of the most prominent Tory liberals, yet divided the party It has ensured that Mr Hague is in the news. It has provided a hope, however slender, of restoring the Tories' primacy on law and order. For most of the Tory party, William Hague's row with the Government over the police and race is a welcome distraction from its internal troubles. His speech last week received a less than glowing endorsement from John Redwood on Friday.

But it has not, outside the ranks of the most prominent Tory liberals, yet divided the party It has ensured that Mr Hague is in the news. It has provided a hope, however slender, of restoring the Tories' primacy on law and order. But it is also in growing danger of unravelling. For even if you agree with him, Mr Hague has made at least three errors The first was to get his figures on stop-and-search wrong. The second was not to shore up his set of tough right-wing attitudes with a prepared chorus of support from credible black figures. After all, if what he says has the backing in the black community that he claims, that should have been easy. But the third error was to yield to the temptation to create a fresh set of weekend headlines with a facile association of the murder of Damilola Taylor with his onslaught on the Macpherson report.That was easily the worst error, as the public attack by the Taylor parents on his use of their son's death demonstrated yesterday.

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Mr Hague did not, directly, lay the blame for it either on a fall in police numbers or on the alleged nervousness that his allies in the Police Federation claim some police officers suffer from, post Macpherson, "when dealing with ethnic-minority suspects". But he cannot, as a skilled professional politician, have had any other purpose in mentioning the north Peckham murder in that context. Indeed the local community leader who backed him yesterday assumed without hesitation that Mr Hague was attributing the murder to the lack of policemen on the beat.The link was specious for several reasons. For a start, the continuing fall in the numbers of the Metropolitan Police is surely at least as attributable to the the high costs of living in London and the shortage of affordable housing as it is to any loss of morale as a result of the Macpherson report. Second, the chances of an officer, even in a force fully up to strength, coming upon a crime as it is actually committed are notoriously low.

Finally, there are some signs that an intelligence-based, carefully targeted use of stop-and-search is rather more effective than the crude random methods that have historically caused so much offence because they are much more directed at blacks than whites.That doesn't mean that Mr Hague has no right to talk about crime or the disproportionate number of street crimes committed by young black men against other young black men. Nor even that he has no business taking the occasional sideswipe at the political correctness of what Mr Hague loves to call the liberal élite.It wasn't necessarily sensible for the Macpherson report to use the jargon term "institutional racism" about the Met. But that does not excuse Mr Hague's trying to pretend away the plain and lasting importance of the report - which remains as great as when he commendably greeted it in the Commons by declaring on the day of its publication that if some good was to come out of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, then "we must all learn the lessons of what went wrong and commit ourselves to build a nation in which every citizen, regardless of colour and creed, is treated with justice and respect."What Macpherson exposed was an unforgivable degree of casual neglect and horrifying incompetence by the police officers investigating the Lawrence murder. And nobody has seriously challenged the Macpherson finding that the one witness of the crime, Duwayne Brooks, would never have been so shamefully ignored had he been white.It was therefore unsurprising, and almost certainly necessary, that the Metropolitan Police should suffer a loss of morale after the publication of the report. That is often the way in institutions that need reform, which, to the credit of its senior officers the Met is now beginning to get.Mr Hague appeared to understand that very clearly when the report was published, in February 1999. And it's difficult to explain his apparent change of heart by anything other than a desire, five months before an election in which his party is trailing in the polls, to accommodate the reactionary urgings of the Police Federation and the campaigning skills of The Daily Telegraph.That is not, however, quite the way the modern Tory party sees it.

For beyond the usual suspects, it wasn't particularly easy yesterday to find Tory MPs who profoundly disagreed with Mr Hague's latest démarche on the police. Steve Norris, who actually campaigned on the streets of London, and Ted Heath, who won an election against all the odds in 1970 after sacking Enoch Powell for his infamous "rivers of blood" speech, have already taken issue with their party leader. It may even be that Michael Portillo feels squeamish about it. But even if he does, he will be cautious about letting it be known -precisely because of the febrile state of the Tory party at present.For the much greater internal crisis faced by the Tory party at present isn't about the police, nor indeed much about policy at all. It concerns instead the fatal preoccupation with what will happen after an election that nearly every Conservative MP now believes will be lost. In particular, there is a subterranean but fierce war between those on the hard right of the party and the "softer" right currently represented by Mr Portillo and his sometime ally Francis Maude. The war is about the post-election succession if Mr Hague is seen to fail.