Fenland came to the rescue of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire in their bid to find a Conservative willing to be interviewed on air hours after the Rochester and Strood by election.

Councillor Steve Tierney, chairman of Wisbech Conservative Association and a town and district councillor, answered the call from the Paul Stainton mid morning programme.

The BBC presenter told listeners that almost every Conservative they had asked to come onto the programme was either busy or unavailable.

“If you had seen amount of calls producer Ben and others had put in you would be amazed,” he said.

Cllr Tierney said it was “always disappointing when you lose; it is a point of democracy to get people to vote and they vote for what they want”.

He said it was “worth noting” the electorate had voted for the same MP as they already had (although he had switched from Conservatives to UKIP) so “it’s not a big a change as some would like to present it”,

He described UKIP as having “captured people’s ears” with some thinking any change is a good change; it was a common message in politics.

Cllr Tierney felt the “bubble pops fairly swiftly” once promises were not honoured and it was sometimes hard to work out UKIP’s policies when they could quickly change.

But he insisted that “I don’t want to knock them, people should come forward and make policies they want. We all try to do it in an honest way- the worst thing is a politician who will say something and not carry it through.”

Questioned whether he would be tempted to join UKIP he said he didn’t like “the undertones of their policies”.

What he disliked most was those members of UKIP who would “say anything to get elected, it was what the Lib Dems used to do and it worked for a while for them and has stopped working. I suspect the pendulum tends to swing in politics.”

Cllr Tierney described politicians of all parties as a “big coalition of people who have sort of similar ideas but we’re not all the same”.

Of the next election he felt no one could safely predict the outcome “and that’s not just UKIP either because no one knows the depth of followings of the main parties. “We don’t know if the Lib Dems might resurge although they got a terrible result last night actually they stick in quite well where they are in local politics”.

He said the run up to the General Election would be “quite exciting, engaging people in the process.”