AS the dust is still swirling a week after Theresa May's snap election West Dorset MP Oliver Letwin - returned with an increased majority - says he's already back at work on Brexit.

He's working on the EU Directives that can be translated - without controversy - into UK law.

But despite the turmoil over the lack of a Tory majority - something he didn't predict but wasn't surprised by - Mr Letwin says the media is making it more dramatic than it is and the Conservatives will be able to deliver a stable government for the next five years..

He said: "What is actually happening is much less dramatic than some elements of the media have anticipated. I think there will a stable government for the next five years and it will get on with the job."

Even though he'd planned to retire in 2020 Mr Letwin says he has the energy and will to carry on.

"I am very glad to be in Parliament during the next two or three years when some really important things about the future of the country are going to be decided."

But said there had been a lot of 'loose talk' about Brexit negotiations but warned the coming 'three dimensional game of chess' wasn't only up to the UK.

"To the greatest extent possible obviously we should seek consensus among the parties but inevitably this is not something that can just be decided by consensus on the part of the UK.

"I think there has been a great deal of loose talk as if the UK got to decide what it all looks like.

"But that is not how it is. It is a negotiation and therefore in the end it is question about what can be negotiated rather than what somebody in any party would desire to be negotiated. The other side of the negotiations will have a major role."

And he thinks the DUP is a natural bedfellow to team up with the Conservatives to give it a majority.

He said: "The DUP have traditionally voted with us on almost all important votes so I think all this is is a formalisation of what has been the practice.

"What it does mean is that in the UK wide votes on budgets and votes of confidence and Brexit that the government will have the support it needs in the House of Commons."

He does think, though that parts of Tory policy will have to be abandoned in what is now a two-party political landscape - not because the share of Conservative votes went down - it didn't - but because Labour's share went up.

"I think there is no doubt at all that a large selection of the electorate was attracted by the promises of an early Christmas from Mr Corbyn and some of that is something that we need to pay a great deal of attention to because I think that a large number of people in the electorate were expressing a concern that after seven years of dealing with the deficit there was too great a squeeze on the expenditure on public services.

"I certainly did not believe that Mr Corbyn's recipe for dealing with by massive borrowing is in any way a sensible way forward but I do think that it has become clear that we need to increase the spending on crucial public services."

Mr Letwin was also keen to applaud the appointment of Michael Gove as Environment Secretary, saying he had the energy and intelligence to deal with the massive amount of negotiation needed in the face of Brexit.

He said: "DEFRA has an enormous role to play over the next few years. There is a massive amount of negotiation about the agricultural components of free trade and also about the way we handle fisheries after our departure form the Common Fisheries policy.

"And there is an enormous amount of work to do in bringing existing regulation in agriculture into UK law and then there is an enormous amount of further work to do in providing a proper successor to the Common Agricultural Policy as a way of supporting farmers and all of those demand enormous amounts of energy and intelligence and that is precisely what Michael Gove has in abundance."

He admitted farmers were worried about their future but said the government was committed to continued support for the industry.