Despite not having paid a subscription this year, and despite having recommended and voted for another party at the European elections last June, and despite having drawn these and other facts repeatedly to the attention of Central Office, I find myself still counted as a member of the Conservative Party. This may be an effect of bureaucratic incompetence, or it may proceed from a desire not to cross names off the membership register of without better reasons than I have managed so far to provide - namely a court order or at least an obituary in The Daily Telegraph. But whatever the reason, I have been sent a copy of the first issue of this magazine.

Leaving aside its glossy, three colour appearance, Heartland is sad stuff - and is sand stuff even compared with Conservative Newsline and other previous efforts at a Party magazine. Its main item is a fawning interview with William Hague, written by James Bartholomew, about whom I have no biographical details are given, but against whose name I have placed a question mark on my Candidlist - that is, my Internet list of Conservative candidates and where they stand on Europe.

Even with complete control over the questions asked, and control over the reporting of the answers, Mr Hague manages to make a fool of himself. He agrees, for example, that the slogan "In Europe but not run by Europe" is "the most successful the Party has used for years". He adds: "And we did not have to get it from advertising agency. We just said what we meant. It was my slogan."

It is, of course, a fatuous slogan, intended to deceive the unwary into thinking that Tory policy on Europe is firmer than it had really is. And it implies an insult to the intelligence of the public, with Mr Hague's belief that constant repetition of six words can take the place of rational argument. In its expression of a readily coherent doctrine, it is the political equivalent of the Athanasian creed.

Again, he accuses the Government and of being "weak" in its fight against crime. In the obvious sense, this is true. The Government will not restore the death penalty for murder, will not restore corporal punishment for a juvenile offences against life and property, and will not allow individuals the means to defend themselves against crime. But Mr Hague is not being obvious here. He does not believe in these simple but effective answer to crime. Instead, he wants the Government to go even further than it does in fighting the War on Drugs, which is a war on freedom of choice that can be fought only with the weapons of a police state. He wants more at bugging and burgling of homes by police fiat, faster moves towards civil asset forfeiture on the American model, and more effort to establish a national identity card scheme. He calls this conservatism. I will say that William Pitt, in the worst days of the war against Revolutionary France, where our foreign allies were all overrun, and our credit was exhausted, and there were genuine fears of a Jacobin fifth column in Ireland, Scotland and even England, would have rejected such measures with scornful contempt.

All else in the magazine is equally worthless. Looking through these 18 pages of insipid prose, I was reduced in the end to a underlining the grammatical errors, of which I found an astonishing number. Perhaps the worst was a misused apostrophe on the back page - "An affectionate look at the House of Lords in the words of it's own members". How these people can dare speak about education standards is beyond me.

I have thrown the magazine away, but cannot so easily forget how shockingly bad it is. And the badness of it hurts. For all my rejection of the leadership and its official policies, my political home remains in the Conservative Party. It is corrupted. It has betrayed the ideals and interests of its members. But I draw no pleasure from contemplating its presently ruinous state. I really do wish that Heartland had been a better magazine, and that it were part of a Conservative revival that would sweep out of power not merely the persons of New Labour, but also the whole mass of intellectual tendencies that it embodies. But we are stuck with Heartland as it is - the official voice of a Party led by a man who, for all the impression he finds it convenient to give in his speeches to the Party Conference, would sit very comfortably as a junior member of the Blair Cabinet.

Sean Gabb