HAVE you ever thought about the honesty of would-be MPs at election time - and how much trust you’d actually be prepared to put in them?

Worcester UKIP candidate Paul Hickling posted a message on Facebook after the Manchester terror atrocity calling for a return of the death penalty, which this newspaper thought our readers ought to know about.

After asking for his permission we went ahead, using his salient points word-for-word-verbatim, which ran alongside some critical remarks from rival parliamentary candidates and a mosque leader.

Mr Hickling’s response? Attending a hustings debate at Worcester’s Cap ‘n’ Gown pub on Monday night, he called this writer “a snake” before going off on a rant that can only be described as pure fantasy.

First, he claimed he told this newspaper that he’d asked us to run it “word for word” when giving permission (not true, we have the emails to prove it, this wasn't mentioned once).

Then, he said “I’ve now seen that they’ve completely changed” his words (not true, we copied and pasted his words absolutely verbatim).

Mr Hickling then said we’d got his words “completely wrong” (again, it was lifted word and word) before claiming this newspaper was “saying, more or less, that I want to kill all the 3,000 extremists on the (terror suspect) list”.

Of course we didn’t say that, either.

All we did was run, in the exact same order, his own very words, in an exacting and dutiful manner. Nothing more, nothing less.

This job is never an easy one, especially at election time when tensions are high and political nuances are here, there and everywhere.

Our simple aim is to cut through the bull and tell people what we think they need to know as accurately, fairly and impartially as we can.

But it’s made all the more harder when people seek to spin and deceive. A bit like Donald Trump, actually.

Memo to wannabe politicians: don’t play us, and by extension the voting public, for utter fools.