In a bizarre rant in an Oxfordshire local newspaper, UKIP councillor David Silvester has said that floods are God’s revenge for gay marriage.

He wrote: ‘The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters.’

Although the Henley Standard – which says it has been delivering the news from Henley on Thames and South Oxfordshire for over 100 years – decided not to upload the letter to its website, it was captured by Twitter user Tamsin Borlase

He added: ‘I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same sex marriage Bill.

‘But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.

‘Now, even as Cameron sheds crocodile tears on behalf of destitute flooded homeowners, playing at advocate against the very local councils he has made cash-strapped, it is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.

‘He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain ‘great’ and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scaled of divine approval or disapproval.’

Silvester, who resigned from the Tory party over gay marriage, has become infamous in his area for his strongly conservative views. He wrote at the time: ‘The Prime Minister defied the majority in his party to propose and pass an anti-Christian and ungodly vote to sanction same-sex marriage’, adding that it was ‘an important subject to a Bible-believing Christian.’

More recently, and having been welcomed by the United Kingdom Independence Party, he suggested that a new Fat Face clothing store should change its name to ‘something more poetic’.