The Conservative leadership imposed its will yesterday and reinstated the former transport minister, Mr Steven Norris, to its short list for mayor of London.
The Conservatives must now hope they have restored some credibility in the mayoral selection race which has been dogged by controversy since the party's first choice of candidate, Lord Archer, resigned last month.
After three days of confusion, the Conservative Party chairman, Mr Michael Ancram, emerged from a meeting of the board of the Conservative Party in London to declare that Mr Norris and, by definition, the selection process were back on track.
"It is part of the nature of democracy that sometimes there are disagreements and sometimes those disagreements are not resolvable in any other way than a reference back to another body," Mr Ancram said.
"It came to us, we resolved it and we are now handing it back to the members in London - that's democracy. The process was designed to be democratic; democracy is sometimes untidy."
The Conservative leader, Mr William Hague, welcomed Mr Norris's reinstatement and acknowledged the turmoil that had threatened to engulf the party.
"No one would claim the last few days have been the easiest in the selection of our candidate for London mayor. We've learnt the hard way that democratic decision-making in the Conservative Party can be robust and it can be untidy," he said.
The Conservative Party board unanimously agreed to extend the list of candidates who will go forward to a series of public hustings later today from four to six to include Mr Norris and another candidate, Mr Paul Lynch.
The board reversed Saturday's decision by the party's mayoral selection executive to exclude Mr Norris from the short list after the executive received a letter from his former constituency chairman in Epping Forest attacking his colourful private life, which included several affairs while he was married.
The dramatic pace of events had continued through to Monday this week when the party's electoral college, including members of the London constituency associations, asked the executive to reconsider its decision to exclude Mr Norris.
However, the executive, whose members are part of the electoral college, then promptly referred the whole matter to the party's board.
Reinstating Mr Norris meant the board also had to approve changes to its selection rules which Mr Ancram insisted would provide the party's 40,000 London members with "the widest practical choice of candidates" in its consideration of which names would go forward to a postal ballot next year.
Mr Norris was clearly relieved to be back in the race and said he had given Mr Hague an assurance that there were no skeletons lurking in his past. "People must take me as I am, and that is what 40,000 members of the Tory party must now do. If they would sooner have someone else, it will be their decision," he said.
But a Cabinet Minister, Mr Ian McCartney, reacted to Mr Norris's reinstatement by criticising the Tories' mayoral selection process as an exercise in weak leadership.