Wannabe Buckingham candidate John Stevens’ postal attack on the sitting MP has brought the local press to Speaker Bercow’s aid.

Yesterday the The Bucks Herald (fed by the Bercow camp) headlined with ‘Bid to oust John Bercow through letter campaign’. On first reading, I read ‘letter-bomb campaign’, but the wishfully-thinking brain often plays this kind of trick.

First with the news as always, The Slog has a copy of Stevens’ letter (shown above) which is rather less vitriolic than the original flier he sent out.

Both harp on the same theme: Bercow is a ‘sickening three-times second-home flipper'(very few Olympic divers can match this feat) and the voters of Buckingham deserve to have a say on whether this ‘little turncoat’ should go to Parliament as The Speaker.

Stevens’ ruse may have backfired. It’s one thing for the residents of Bucks to decide that they think Bercow is a pillock, but another thing entirely for an outsider to tell them this.

Constituent James Helm from Winslow told The Bucks Herald that people would support John Bercow once they saw ‘the whole picture’. As an opinion, this is diametrically opposed to the one gained so far by Slog readers.

Meanwhile, the story that the Daily Mail thought to have no real story in it has attracted more comments than any story in The Slog’s history, and been picked up by Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Old Holborn, and Anna Raccoon… The last of these tells me joyously that her ‘came from’ hits largely originated in the Wapping area: I’m not surprised. The Times is not happy about losing the lead on this one.

PS Slog hits more than doubled on the day we released the story