Vandals targeted a Conservative MP days before the election by deliberately flooding her garden with 1,300 litres of sticky oil.

Last week cars belonging to Ms Leslie and her elderly father Ian, 70, were daubed with paint and the words 'Tory Scum' were scrawled along the bodywork.

Charlotte Leslie has written about her shock at finding that vandals had punctured the oil tank in her garden, causing her parents' entire heating supply for the year to seep into the ground.

The thuggery seems to have been prompted by Ms Leslie's support for unconventional oil and gas development. In other words it's the environmentalists again.