Ivan Massow, the gay millionaire businessman and former Tory adviser who defected to Labour, has confessed he misses his old party.

Eighteen months after his spectacular political U-turn, the Brighton-born entrepreneur has revealed he is having second thoughts.

Massow told a magazine he felt as though he was in a political wilderness.

He said: "I don't have any involvement with Labour at all. I don't think the Labour Party sees me as one of them in any way. I don't have a political home, I'm in no-man's-land."

Massow, 34, chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art, said: "The party never seems to have included me very much in its plans, which is unfortunate because I quite like politics.

"I go into Conservative Central Office and I realise how much I miss it in a way. There are the same lovely old ladies who mother you and offer to make you cakes.

"Then you go into the Labour Party headquarters and it is full of power women with short hair, wearing black suits and screaming down mobile phones.

"It's all so ambitious. I don't know whether traditional Labour thinking means they can't accept someone who was once in the Tory Party or whether it's such a competitive organisation that they see me as a threat."

Mr Massow left the Conservative Party in August 2000 in protest at its policies on gay rights and asylum-seekers Despite a fondness for his old party, he insists he has no plans to go back.