BRITAIN:British Conservative MP Quentin Davies defected to Labour yesterday, saying the Conservatives had "no bedrock", in a timely propaganda coup for Gordon Brown.
"Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything," Mr Davies, a former Northern Ireland spokesman for the Conservatives, told party leader David Cameron in a letter.
"It exists on shifting sands," he added. "A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda."
Mr Cameron told the defecting MP: "I am sorry you feel unable to be part of today's Conservative Party . . . you have made your choice and the British people will make theirs."
Mr Davies has been an MP for 20 years. He served as parliamentary private secretary at the department of education and the home office when the Conservatives were in power.
Mr Davies has also been opposition spokesman for social security and pensions, and defence.
Since 1997, he has represented Grantham, birthplace of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He told Sky News that time and again he found Conservative policy confused and not properly thought out on a range of issues, including Europe, Iraq and the National Health Service.
"I do not think David Cameron is one of those people who has a clear framework in his mind of what the country needs, what he wants to achieve, what the bottom line is, what the right approach to politics is and what the wrong approach to politics is," he said.