I'm going to spoil my ballot next week - and this is why

JUST five full days to go now for us all to decide how to vote. Almost half of us still haven't fully made up our minds, polls suggest. An abnormally high number for this late in the campaign - and I'm one of them.

- Tom Newton Dunn

I'm a floating voter. I've never held a party allegiance, but chop and change for who I think is best for the country at the time. Ten million of us do the same, and I've done it diligently in every general election since 1992.

This time though, I just cannot work it out. And I'm in agony here.

My tortured deliberations keep leading me back to a little-remembered Nineties film I loved called Crazy People (strapline: "You have to be a little nuts to tell the truth").

Dudley Moore plays a burnt-out New York advertising executive. After a nervous breakdown, he checks into a psychiatric hospital, where he shares his woes about the duplicity of his industry with his fellow patients.

Their response to him is novel: why don't you just tell Americans the truth about what you're selling? His new friends get to work and come up with their own bluntly honest ad slogans.

"Volvo they're boxy but they're good". Or, "Forget Paris, the French can be annoying. Come to Greece, we're nicer." Enthused, Dudley submits them.

And guess what, to everyone's astonishment the truth proves wildly popular. That's the nub of this election campaign for me. I'm craving some unbridled honesty.

This is the actual truth: Britain's in a bit of a mess. Not terminal, and it won't last forever, but a mess it is.

We all know it. We see it in front of our eyes daily. In the potholes we drive over that never get fixed, in the eternal wait to get your child a GP appointment, in our monthly rent and mortgage demands.