GAZETTE & HERALD: LIB Dem Paul Fox's victory in last week's Chippenham Sheldon Ward by-election has been tainted by accusations of a smear campaign against him.

Mr Fox, who won the county council seat recently vacated by Sandie Webb, used his acceptance speech to attack the Conservatives who he claimed wrote lies about him in their campaign literature.

The politician, who has lived in Chippenham for two years, used his speech to rubbish what he claimed were attempts to paint him as an outsider, because he resigned his seat at Islington Borough Council in November last year.

Conservatives say they were stunned by what they described as the vitriol of the attack, but the Liberal Democrats later played down the incident claiming it was simply a "robust" response to "inaccuracies" and "untruths" in the literature.

Mr Fox, who was born in Cirencester, was on holiday this week and unavailable for comment, but his political agent Richard McCarthy said complaints about the speech were just sour grapes.

"Paul is quite a passionate campaigner and one thing he is particularly passionate about is not lying to the public," he said. "I think the Tories have spread a lot of blatant untruths throughout the campaign.

"They tried to suggest Paul owns a house in London and Paul was simply giving a robust response to untruths and setting the record straight."

But Conservative candidate Arnie "Nick" Fry, who has lived in Chippenham all his life, said: "I was totally astonished at what happened," he said. "As far as I was concerned he won quite easily, but then there was this outburst."

Mr Fry added that as far as he knew all the information printed in the party's literature was checked to ensure it was accurate, before it was distributed.

He said the question of how local Mr Fox is was not an issue as far as he was concerned. But he said he found it difficult to understand how Mr Fox felt he could stand for election as a local man.

"We didn't say he doesn't live here," he said. "But I don't consider someone who has just moved in from Islington as local in the same way as myself or the Labour candidate who have lived here all our lives."

According to Lib Dems Mr Fox was also disappointed by comments made by Conservative MP for North Wiltshire James Gray last week in his weekly column in the Gazette, where he wrote: 'The Labour and Conservative candidates are true locals; the Liberal resigned his seat to stand here."

Mr Gray said he stood by what he wrote and challenged Mr Fox, who will contest his Parliamentary seat at the next general election, to find any inaccuracies in his column, published the day before the election.

Mr Fox won the seat with 1,052 votes followed by Mr Fry with 400 and then Labour candidate Maureen Lloyd with 307.