THE recent district council election results in Coleford East and in Redmarley muddy the waters considerably on two questions that have occupied the minds of local politicians. Firstly, after the county council elections, UKIP have been on a high, and may have assumed that they are now the main challengers to the Conservatives in the forthcoming Parliamentary election – they have certainly looked cocky in your letter pages.

However, they came a poor second in both, achieving between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the vote in each case. Even if you assume that none of that is protest voting that will evaporate at a general election, that will not suffice in 2015.

The Tories, in full Conference flood as I write, saw them off comfortably in Redmarley, but the situation in the other ward was different.

On what must be an historic low of 13.4 per cent in Coleford East, the Conservative vote was on a par with both Liberal Democrats and the Independent, and they were only a few percentage points away from coming last. Many of the postal votes that have been assumed to have helped the Tories in the past seem to have shifted to other parties.

Coleford East was hard fought, with lots of boots on the ground, but a rainy polling day, according to conventional wisdom, affects Labour the worst, and so suggests that the Labour vote is stronger than the victory achieved.

So where does that put the three parties? In a dog fight for sure. The Forest of Dean no longer looks like a safe seat for Mark Harper, so that could have re-ignited the other popular debate – whether Harper would jump ship for a safer seat elsewhere. But too late! He has just been re-selected. Perhaps he thinks that Redmarley is typical of the constituency as a whole, that electors have already forgotten the attempted privatisation of the Forest, or that Labour and UKIP will be splitting the anti-Tory vote.

That's not how it works, Mr Harper!

– Roger Brewis, Coleford.