MP Mark Harper ran for his life and was pelted with eggs when he left a public meeting at about the Forest's future on Friday night.

A crowd of more than 200 who had waited for two hours in the rain shouted "Mark Harper out" as he left by a back entrance to The Main Place in Coleford. He was whisked away in a waiting police van which ran over the foot of one protester as it drove off.

Concern had been raised earlier in the day by protester Alan Robertson that the meeting called by Mark Harper with only two days' notice, was being held in a venue which could only accommodate 160 people.

A PA system which organiser Alastair Fraser had said would relay the meeting to those outside failed to materialise adding to the anger of the crowd.

This threatened to derail the meeting from the outset because the noise of the protesters outside was drowning the speakers inside.

Mark Harper told the placard-holding audience in the hall that he had come to listen to their questions after giving a brief introduction about what Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman was proposing for the Forest of Dean. She was looking at transferring the Forest to a charitable trust, he said, and the three-month consultation period on this had just begun with a Defra document which could be accessed online.

There was criticism of the document itself which fails to give the option of keeping the Forest of Dean as it is.

Questions raised included concern about contiguous woodland, the recently reported cost of the proposed change in a time of recession, fears about what would happen if a charitable trust got into financial difficulties and worries about the type of people rumoured to have been earmarked to sit on it.

A peremptory show of hands at the end of the meeting revealed that the majority were in favour of retaining the status quo with the Forest remaining as a national asset run by the Forestry Commission.

Councillor Andrew Gardiner, who led a delegation to the House of Lords recently, commented after the event that it was a carbon copy of the meeting held by Conservative MP Paul Marland in 1981 when the Forest of Dean was under threat of sell-off. The only difference was the fact that Paul Marland did a U-turn and Mark Harper hasn't.