Conservative candidate for North Devon once called rural voters "straw-sucking yokels"

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I suspect the Liberal Democrat campaign in North Devon will be greatly heartened by a story in the Western Morning News:

A Conservative candidate in one of the South West's most rural constituencies once derided the countryside as populated by "chinless foxhunters, straw-sucking yokels and whingeing farmers". 

In a newspaper column, Peter Heaton-Jones, a would-be MP in North Devon and former BBC DJ, launched an attack on the huge countryside march through central London in 2002, arguing if rural life is "so bad" they should "move to the town".

Heaton-Jones' defence is that the articles he wrote for the Evening Advertiser in Swindon were designed to provoke a response - he was also a 'shock jock' for BBC Wiltshire - and were "not my views".

But if you put your name to views you do not really hold, you can hardly complain if they later come back to bite you,