SAYINGS you don't often hear, number 174: "You've got to feel some sympathy for that Michael Howard."

Yes, the man who had something of the night about him now has something of a dilemma about wayward party MPs careering dangerously off-message.

Appropriate to a man who was cruelly but tellingly linked by his own former ministerial colleague to the gothic-horror genre, the Tory leader was damned if he did drive a stake through the heart of Howard Flight's political career and also damned if he didn't.

To recap, Howard Flight, the rich Tory bloke you had never heard of, is supposed to have told a meeting of Tories last week that the party needed to get elected before admitting how much it wanted to transform the British state. Even Labour could hardly have imagined it would be gifted such a generous contribution to its central message that Michael Howard is about to sack every nurse, doctor and teacher, and probably put all the nation's first-borns to the sword.

So the Tory leader had a choice:

wield the axe on someone saying what many in the party think, and risk alienating the grassroots, or be seen to tolerate a broad church and risk looking weak and confused. No-one was surprised that Flight was turfed out of his party deputy chairman's post. But the party leader went further, barring his namesake from being a candidate at the imminent election, apparently because he had visions of the Arundel constituency and the airwaves being flooded by legitimised Labour threats of a secret Tory agenda to butcher the public sector.

This is how martyrs are made, and how leaders are tested. Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor, was in Edinburgh yesterday, describing the move as "a dramatic gesture"which caused much emotional angst to all those involved. It is also how a Tory party which had built up some handy campaign momentum in recent weeks has been derailed, with Labour using the debacle to move the campaign back to that preferred core message.

The blame, of course, is being pinned on Labour dirty tricks, allegedly sending a blind German spy to the meeting, by the name of Joerg Tretow. He claims alibi in Berlin.

Stickwith this, because it gets more bizarre. Another Tory candidate, in Slough, has been bumped because he thinks Europe is a Roman Catholic conspiracy and John Major was a traitor for signing the Maastricht treaty, having himself replaced a previous candidate whose knife and gun fetish had come to light on a dodgy website. And if you think it's just the Tories losing the plot, yesterday saw leaked plans for Tony Blair to save the world from disasters, with a warning system to tell us when we are about to be struck by tsunamis and asteroids. Presumably it fails to detect signs of the disastrous impact of illegal invasions in faraway countries.

April Fool's Day is going to have to go some to top all this.

For Michael Howard, meanwhile, a tactical response risks exploding in his face. He has raised significant questions about the centralisation of party politics, the role of the MP and the space in politics for independent thinking. Tories, more than others, adhere to the view of the constituency association as enjoying autonomy within a network.

Loyalty to the leadership is a central tenet of Conservatism. But note that it is loyalty rather than centrallyimposed discipline.

It is only since the 1997 failure to oust Neil Hamilton from his humiliating candidacy in Tatton that the leader has had such powers to bar candidates, apparently at will. Absolute loyalty to the central line is now being required. A constituency party can have anyone it wants as its candidate, so long as he, or less often she, is fully on-message.

This is the death knell for that necessary ingredient of politics: dissidence. What chance, now, of people being elected who not only think for themselves but, crucially, are willing to speak independently and off-message as well? The nearest modern equivalent is Boris Johnson, not because he has anything interesting to say but because of the blundering comedy of someone who burbles the half-remembered party line without any conviction, and then smirks knowingly.

This week, it is the Tories' embarrassment. But Labour came this way a long time ago, and much damage it has done. As Tam Dalyell departs the House of Commons, the number of free spirits dwindles. And don't expect Tony Blair to create Lord Dalyell of the Binns with the immense patronage he intends to fashion for himself in a wholly-appointed House of Lords. Expect post-election ermine to be reserved for loyalists. The awkward squad need not apply.

Given a clean slate with the first election of a Scottish Parliament six years ago, Labour did devolution and itself a huge disservice with a party selection machine that rewarded only those who could tick the policy boxes and pledge unquestioning allegiance to the party. Its purge of able, thoughtful candidates should continue to shame it. It has still not figured out a way to let more wayward talents rise.

Policy power is focused in the hands of a McConnell leadership that closes down alternative voices, doing short-term tactics much better than long-term strategy. If there is original thought going on in Scottish Labour, it is being done very secretly.

Much more likely is the use of political know-how to fight within parties. Across Scotland, councillors are waking up to the implications of the new map of multi-member wards, with a voting system that will make the intra-party battles much keener than the inter-party ones. Expect Labour to crack the disciplinary whip once more, while using large public pay-offs to those willing to go quietly.

While proportional voting is a welcome reform, it suffers from a Labour-LibDem deal on ward size which disadvantages those outside the mainstream. Out go the council hopes of Socialists and Greens, as well as many of the independents who have held sway for generations in rural authorities.

That is not the public's choice. It was a coalition fix. And across the Holyrood chamber from Labour, a growing band of dissidents offers a weekly reminder of the price to be paid for that approach. Given the choice, voters increasingly want to kick the party system. Dennis Canavan sits on a thumping majority as a rebuke to those who deemed him "not good enough" to represent Labour. Jean Turner is the hospital campaignerwho ousted Labour from Strathkelvin and Bearsden because its last MSPwas more in tune with his party than his constituents, providing momentum to a campaign which is this week giving a nasty jolt to the sitting MP, Rosemary McKenna, in the neighbouring Lanarkshire seat.

While single-issue candidates can usefully make a point, there are doubts about their usefulness once elected. The established parties point out that you don't know what you're getting from a senior citizens' representative once dismounted from his hobby-horse, or from a hospital campaigner when out of surgical scrubs and addressing questions of schools, identity cards or law reform. But if the alternative from party candidates, MPs and MSPs is unthinking devotion to the leadership line, is that a really whole lot better?