So Tony Blair will lose next year's General Election. And the reason? Not the failing schools and the disastrously expensive and grossly inefficient NHS. Not the inexorable rise in violent crime. Nor the collapse of the pension funds. Nor Gordon Brown's relentless imposition of higher taxes to pay his army of public employees.

None of these failures will be enough to have New Labour chucked out. And Labour's forthcoming defeat will not be brought about by coherent attacks on their appalling record by Her Majesty's Opposition, for the Tories are in a worse state than they've been in for a century. All the sitting targets presented to them by this lousy Government - and they can't hit one of them. The Conservative Party is a shambles, hopeless, a busted flush, a national disgrace and dead in the water.

The cause of Blair's downfall will be the ban on foxhunting. Really? Why? Let's look for a minute at a little lesson from history. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell's men chopped off the head of Charles I and got rid of "the old order". They established a puritanical totalitarian government which bossed the English people about in every aspect of their lives.

Like Blair's lot, the Puritans liked banning things: the traditional and greatly loved Prayer Book, musical entertainments, theatres - they even tried to ban Christmas. All this prohibition didn't work. It never works because it is ultimately unworkable.

Banning won't work for Blair either. And the reason is that millions of our people will simply not accept it. Peter Bradley MP, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Alun Michael, finally owned up last weekend. He admitted: "The struggle over the foxhunting Bill was not just about animal welfare. It was class war". He said that the ban was New Labour's attempt to "kill off the old order."

Just like Cromwell. Just like Stalin. Foxhunting is not being banned because of the threats from the psychopaths in the animal rights movement. It is not even being banned because of the endemic mawkishness of the sentimentalists who go all gooey over little furry creatures - and now at last a Labour politician has admitted it.

And the ban won't work for the plain reason that it is unworkable. All over the country hundreds of thousands will rebel; and millions more in the cities will support them.

They will be prepared to break the law because they regard this law as unjust. It is unjust because it prohibits the freedom of individuals to engage in a harmless pursuit.

Labour argues that the ban is democratic. This is a gross perversion of the meaning of democracy. Democracy - as that great Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill said - means protecting the rights of legitimate minority opinion.

For the first time since New Labour came to power I have some rekindled political hope. They are on the way out. The writing is on the wall for this tawdry, mean-spirited bunch of class warriors.

Chesterton warned politicians: "We are the English people and we have not spoken yet." Mr Blair and your fellow commissars, look out! The English people are about to speak. And that will be the end of New Labour.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.