I used to vote Tory, but after the last year I can't bring myself to do it

Voting for the Tories used to be an evil necessity, but after everything that's happened in the past couple of months - especially the junior doctors row - I shan't be going to the ballot box today

Junior doctors protesting outside the DoH (AFP)

It’s a feeling everyone gets at some point. It may arrive first thing one morning, as you stumble bleary-eyed into the shower and the angry, scolding jets hit your face, a reminder that no amount of scrubbing can cleanse you of your catastrophic error of judgement. It could be on your commute, as you catch a glimpse of the front page of some forlorn rag, or more likely, at the end of the day, when you switch on the news and are confronted with whatever fresh hell you have played a part in unleashing on this week’s profession, minority or small country.

Yes, it happens to all of us, sooner or later. One day we have to gaze disgustedly at ourselves in the bathroom mirror, and face up to the swine we voted for.

Inevitably this sudden dawn occurs in one’s twenties. Idealistic left-wing types are forced to accept that the exciting new coffee they so readily downed, for all its Fair Trade credentials and honest marketing, is in fact the same skinny white latte they thought they’d left behind, tasting of muddy incompetence with hints of petulance and, these days, the faintest whiff of racism (or not racism, depending on who serves the coffee).

It’s a difficult time for such people at the moment, as they look round desperately for alternatives, finding only Tim Farron humming ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ to himself in a corner, and a gaggle of Greens holding hands around an eerily still wind turbine in a Lincolnshire field. ‘Oh God,’ they wail, beating their chests and pulling at their hair, ‘this is it, isn’t it? This is how it ends! No dignity, no grace, just bungled into the airlock and cast into the ether with George Galloway and the withered remains of the NHS. We never even got to bash those bankers Ed promised us.’

It’s a sad state of affairs. It is nowhere near as sad, however, as the miserable self-loathing of many a disgruntled Conservative, watching on with horror as any semblance of a Labour renaissance, and with it, all hope of reforming the Tory party, drifts off into space.

I’m not sure any sane person ever enjoys voting Conservative. It’s more like a tax return; you know you ought to do it, and if you don’t sooner or later something dreadful will happen. But that doesn’t make the horror of doing it any easier.

Sure, you can convince yourself that tax is necessary, but deep down you know it’s being spent by someone you wouldn’t trust to babysit a rock. I’m sure I’m not alone in this view; Tim Montgomerie and others more knowledgeable than I have already headed for the exit, and a vote to remain in the European Union orchestrated by a Tory PM, or further fisting of junior doctors, say, will surely lead to more.

It should be painfully obvious (if you’ll excuse the expression) that though the National Health Service is bloated and often incompetent, pushing doctors to the point of striking through sheer pig-headedness is not a solution. The government is playing politics with the lives of the general public, and it is frankly inexcusable. I don’t believe doctors should ever strike, but I cannot support a party callous enough to force that option. Neither side is taking a responsible approach, but as a friend and junior doctor recently admitted to me, “Either patients will suffer because of the strike, or they’ll suffer because of the government’s changes. It doesn’t really matter if we’re at work or not, the public suffers either way.”

I just can’t do it. The disgust with myself is too overbearing. A party willing to gamble with people’s health, not to mention our national sovereignty, is not a party I want to be affiliated with. It is not a party I want to endorse, and it is not a party I will vote for. Shuffle over, lefties. Is there room for one more in that airlock?