Dear Prime Minister,

I expect you can't hear the whoosh of the chickens coming home to roost for the noise of the wheels falling off the wagon. I sympathise, but I did warn you that sooner or later there would be a tremendous backlash against this passion for everything "new" and "cool".

And now you've got renewed trouble from members of your own party. I bet you winced when the republican Dr Mo Mowlam said the Queen should go and live in a council house. It's the sheer ignorance, rather than her rudeness, that gets through to you, isn't it? She seems to think the Queen sits in Buckingham Palace with her feet up all day sipping champagne and playing canasta. It was all the more agreeable then when she was corrected by a Palace spokesman: "Much of the Palace is made up of offices and it is the working HQ of the British monarchy. Also, it is open to the public and is visited by two million paying guests every year."

No, when it comes to sipping champagne we are accustomed to think of your millionaire lovey backers Ken and Barbara Follett - hardly "the people's socialists" are they? Now they've stuck the knife in as well.

In 1997, the people of this country were so sick of the Tories that they gave you a huge parliamentary majority. Frankly, they were so utterly up with Major and his crew that they would have voted for the National Rubbish Party - and now they are waking up to find that they did. It's been three years of stunts and spin, and at last your Government has been found out by the Women's Institute, of all people. Is it true that the WI were the first un-stage-managed audience you have given a speech to since your election?

I'm afraid it's your own fault: you just haven't kept your promises. School standards are no higher. Well, of course, the spin doctors tell us standards of literacy and numeracy are higher than ever; it's just that more children leave school unable to write or count. Hospital waiting lists refuse to shorten, crime is on the increase and we have fewer police to deal with it. The farming industry is ruined and petrol prices are higher than in any other developed country.

You won't know this, but a couple of months ago I sat behind you and Mrs Blair in the Barbican theatre. The play was TS Eliot's The Family Reunion. I was very pleased to see that you are a fan of Mr Eliot. It might be a good idea then to listen to some of the things he has to say. "A people without history is not redeemed from time." In other words, if you despise your traditional institutions you will destroy society. Oh, but Mr Eliot gets a lot more plain-speaking than that.

Think of your trashy dome and your even more trashy Tate Modern and your endless parade of awards for the so-called "music industry". What does Mr Eliot say? He says: "A mass culture will always be a substitute culture; and sooner or later the deception will become apparent to the more intelligent of those upon whom it has been palmed off." He adds: "In education we are lowering our standards and destroying the ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans."

The truth, as you are beginning so painfully to find out, is that the people of this country are fundamentally conservative in the non-party political sense. They will throw out a Tory government when they feel it has let them down; but when they see the dereliction produced by the alternative, they will be quick to vote them back in again. People will stand for a certain amount of spin, propaganda and tomfoolery, but their patience is wearing thin. You are running out of time.

Yours, Peter Mullen