Sir – Much distress here in West Oxfordshire but their lordships are upset less by Labour seizing a council seat in Chipping Norton, than by the opposition not standing at all in Woodstock. They blame their loss to a Lib Dem on the perfidy of Labour and the Greens in not putting up candidates.

In West Oxfordshire, one is supposed to ask politely for permission to stand — or not to stand.

Apart from foxhunting, there is nothing our local Tories like better than celebrating victory at the count. Like the hunt ball, the count is a social rather than a political occasion. And the occasion on Thursday night was quite ruined for the blue rosettes by the unsporting behaviour of the opposition.

According to BBC News, the leader of Oxfordshire council blamed an evil “collation” of opposition parties for the upset. It was late. “That disenfranchises voters from the opposition parties where they are not able to vote for their own candidates”. It really was late. In huts and sheds and dark corners all over West Oxfordshire, there is muttering and whispering. There are even some hotheads here in the radical ghettos of Witney who think the serfs have been freed from their obligation to vote Tory. Silly, of course, but it is all most unsettling.

Stuart Macdonald, Green Candidate for Witney North