David Cameron goaded me into defecting from the Tories.

Most big decisions are influenced by a range of people, events and considerations, and when asked to explain them, one has to be careful not to over-simplify, or over-emphasise particular events.

However, if there is one moment that inclined me towards leaving the Conservatives and joining Ukip more than any other, it was a meeting of the 1922 Committee which the Prime Minister addressed in June.

I was sitting next to Douglas Carswell [who has since defected to Ukip too] and I was called to ask the first question to the Prime Minister.

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Conservative MP Mark Reckless (pictured with Nigel Farage) has announced he has defected to UKIP

I asked him why, as we had just sent out millions of European election leaflets saying we had brought back control of justice and home affairs from the EU, we were now opting back in to every measure that mattered.

Rather than just saying it was a deal we were stuck with from the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron defended the European Arrest Warrant in passionate terms – despite the fact that as a backbencher he had spoken strongly against such a warrant.

His now apparently passionate defence of it struck us as synthetic. Advised by Lynton Crosby, his Australian image guru, the Prime Minister juts out his jaw and looks serious and sincere when making points, I fear now irrespective of whether he believes in them or not.

The next question asked what the PM wanted to renegotiate before his vaunted EU referendum. An answer, came there none. Instead, Mr Cameron told us that if he were to get back anything like all the powers some people wanted, then Britain would become almost like an ‘associate member’ of the EU.

Worse, he said that as if it were self-evidently a bad thing, rather than what most of his MPs and the country wanted.

Finally, the penny dropped for us that the PM was not serious about renegotiation. All he aspired to was a few token changes, which he could then present as something more significant, just as Labour premier Harold Wilson did in 1975.

The Prime Minister only gave us two arguments why people should not support Ukip. First, it would be a wasted vote as that they could not win MPs. Second, he said that Nigel Farage did not have anyone behind him.

Mr Reckless said Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured) is one of the main reasons he has defected to UKIP

Douglas or I might easily have thought, ‘Well that is easily dealt with’. It was as if Mr Cameron was goading us that we could do more for what we believed in within Ukip than we could as Tories under his leadership.

But, of course, there is much more to my decision than that meeting, and I have not left the Tories to join Ukip lightly.

I’ve been a Tory for as long as I remember. I have friends across that party and I hope we will remain friends. But I’m afraid that the Conservative leadership is now part of Britain’s problem.

For me, that loss of belief and trust that I experienced in the Prime Minister’s policy over Europe has been compounded by broken promises elsewhere.

The reason we supposedly went into coalition with the Lib Dems was to restore order to our public finances. Yet, in five years, a Conservative-led government will add more to the national debt than Labour did in 13.

And now the three Westminster party leaders have just committed themselves indefinitely to giving every Scot £1,600 more a year.

I also promised to help make government more accountable, so MPs would answer to their constituents, not their Whips. Mr Cameron promised Parliament its own timetable, free votes for MPs when amending legislation, open primaries to select MPs, to cut the number of MPs, and give voters the right to sack their MP. None of these promises has materialised.

Mark Reckless joins Douglas Carswell in deflecting from the Conservatives to UKIP

We also promised to do away with Labour’s top-down housing targets that forced us to concrete over our green fields.

Yet, now I find that, under government pressure, my local Conservative council in Medway is increasing its housing target from the annual 815 a year we had under Labour, to at least 1,000. Permission has been given to build 5,000 houses in a bird sanctuary. If that goes ahead, where will it stop?

Despite the promised EU referendum, it is assumed that current rates of open door EU immigration will continue for at least 20 years. I promised at the last Election, as did every other Conservative candidate, that we would cut net immigration from the hundreds of thousands a year to just tens of thousands.

The reality is that in the last year 243,000 more people came to this country than left, back up to the levels we saw under Labour. I’m not always against immigration. It takes guts and energy to cross half the world in search of a better life, and I support sensible controlled, legal immigration.

But if my constituents are asked to accept the case for some immigration, they want to feel we are in control of whom we are admitting and in what numbers. And we have no such sense today.

The insanity of our rules mean that second generation Britons have huge difficulties to bring granny over for a wedding, yet they see our borders open to unlimited EU migrants.

I have had constituents, Sikh or of African heritage, saying they can’t marry the person they love, despite their partners being professionally qualified.

Yet, someone from France or Germany living here is exempt from our rules and can marry anyone they want from outside the EU without earning anything.

Does anyone genuinely support a system where we turn away the best and brightest from our Commonwealth, who have links and family here to make way for unskilled workers from Europe?