Whatever happened to the spirit of '79?

I'm an ad man, and I vote Conservative.

I vote Conservative because my formative years were spent under a Labour Government in the 1970s, and I'm old enough to remember how bloody horrible it was that time around. (It's far, far worse now).

I vote Conservative because I remember the sense of release that came with the election of a half-decent libertarian Government under Mrs Thatcher.

Whereas I'm an ad man, if I'm honest, purely by accident. I almost became a scientist, I almost became a teacher, but I was a 'good-enough' writer and I liked getting paid to write, so I drifted into advertising. It was fun, it was interesting, it provided a decent living. So, like many on the right, I got on with my life - built a business, built a family, and forgot about politics.

But the Left hadn't gone away.

And while people like me took their eyes off the political ball, the Left concentrated instead on taking over our institutions. Britain is generally a conservative country, filled with kind, generous and tolerant people. It's in our nature to put up with a lot. But in the last 10 or even 20 years, things have been done to our poor old country that in lesser places would have provoked riots and revolutions. But us... well, we just let it happen.

Our history has been abolished, demeaned, revised; our liberties shredded; our state schools have become tools to brainwash future generations; our state broadcaster pours forth daily poison; even our once-beloved parliament has become nothing more than a corrupt local assembly, entirely under the sway of a democracy-free supra-national bureaucracy.

And the Conservative Party? The one political grouping that could and should have protected us from all these terrible developments? Well, recently it 'modernised' itself, because that was how that nice Mr Blair won an election all those years ago.

If I have learnt anything during my 25 years in advertising, it is that it is always better to lead rather than to follow; to innovate your own successes, rather than copy the successes of others.

Sadly, at this most crucial of political times, the Conservatives are doing the exact opposite.

C.A.M.