As you will be aware I've had a butterfly in my bonnet for the last couple of weeks about conservationists and the vast sums of money expended on their employment when I and many others can think of far better uses for the cash.

Anyway as a result of my sounding off last week I got a rather stiff communication from someone calling herself Jenny Plackett and describing herself as the 'Two Moors Threatened Butterfly Project Officer'.

A big title that, but I'm not sure whether the 'threatened' refers to the butterfly or to the project officer. I rather fancy it must be the latter: clearly she feels under some kind of threat to describe my comments as 'humourless and offensive', when my sense of humour is pretty much on a par with other people's and I tend only to give offence where I feel it is truly merited.

Personally I don't find anything to laugh at in tens of thousands of pounds being squandered on over-managing parts of my patch in order to conserve stocks of two particular species of butterfly – with no guarantee, of course that the exercise will succeed or that the majority of my constituents will give a monkey's if it does or not.

It could also be the case, of course – as has been shown in the decline of some bird species hereabouts – that the butterflies' numbers are being affected by climate change, which neither you, nor I nor any threatened butterfly officer can do anything about any more than we can tell the sun what time to come up.

What I can assure Ms Plackett is that local councillors and a goodly number of my constituents who are wont to ramble the areas in question also see nothing comical in the kind of overblown schemes with which she and her like are attempting to play God.

Now it could well be that the butterflies of which she speaks are going to be helped to make a full recovery in order to achieve what she regards as being the optimum population size – though who told her what that should be is rather hard to fathom out, unless she has a direct line to upstairs.

It may well be that within a couple of years I shall be getting complaints from my constituents that their progress through the countryside is being impeded and the very sunlight blocked out by dense clouds of butterflies resulting from a successful conservation exercise. Though I have my gravest doubts. And meanwhile money is, quite frankly, being squandered.

Meanwhile I am obliged to pass on the anger of the locals down on the flat bits of my patch at EDF's proposals for a subsidy farm – sorry, wind farm – just in the lee of the Polden Hills.

Generally, of course, I have no axe to grind with EDF and the vast majority of us down here are entirely happy with its proposals for a couple of new nuclear plants. But why it should then seek to get involved in unproven technology whose visible presence will wreck a particularly fine view of the Somerset Levels is beyond me.

You might know that I was a member of the gang of 101 Conservative MPs who voted against more support for wind energy and I have to say nothing I have read in EDF's case for the development has softened my opposition.

These five turbines are ostensibly going to provide power for 5,000 homes but all I can say is that it would have been interesting last week when we had minus umpteen degrees of frost and there wasn't enough breeze to turn a windmill on a sandcastle on Burnham beach, let alone a massive great turbine.

And if EDF is trying to establish some kind of green credentials in order to appease the anti-Hinkley extremists then it's simply deluding itself.