Former Tory director general and ministerial adviser, Sir Paul Judge, has written in this morning's Sunday Times about Jury Team, the new political party he is launching.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show this morning he confirmed that he is no longer a member of he Conservative Party - although the Electoral Commission figures show that he donated £6,000 to the Conservatives as recently as October 10th last year.
The premise of this new party is that political parties are a bad thing, since the party machines and whips wield too much power.
As such, the slate of candidates he intends running for the European elections and future elections will all be Independents with no manifesto and no policies apart from a belief in "our principles of good governance".
Many of those principles are to be applauded, such as wider use of citizen's initiatives and selection of candidates by means of open primaries.
But the idea that political parties could disappear and a democratic country of more than 60 million people be governed by a hotch potch of random people with assorted views on absolutely everything is utterly unrealistic.
Even more absurd is the notion of running a "party list" of Independents at the European Parliament election.
Whilst that electoral system is far from ideal, Independent candidates surely should be by definition exactly that - independent individuals each fighting on their own ticket. Why would anyone vote for the Jury Team party list of candidates when the individuals on the list are all liable to have completely different and opposing views on the whole range of issues of the day?
When another former Conservative, well-heeled knight founded the Referendum Party, he had a very simple message on one policy which was easily articulated. As a result, Sir James Goldsmith successfully garnered hundreds of thousands of votes at the 1997 general election.
Excuse my scepticism, but I cannot see this project having anything like that kind of electoral impact.
