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Hello, help please on

12a - Fool randy Conservative? (5)

Sorry, no letters - Also can someone explain to me the meaning of question marks in cryptic clues? They always confuse me!

C HEAT

thanks desiemac - Still none the wiser on question marks, but never mind!

C on heat (conservative "on heat" {randy}) = cheat

Hi flagondrier and thanks for the parsing. I had in fact understood this by myself but why does it have to have a question mark? Sorry if I appear obtuse !

A question mark usually indicates that the setter is tweaking convention slightly, C on heat is the wordplay; "on heat" means randy, so "randy conservative" gives "C on heat" --> cheat.

Another example might be "sailor on board?" to give "tar" "in a ship" (SS) --> S(TAR)S.

Hi kilgore trout and thanks for responding.

I guess my problem is that to my mind, a cryptic crossword automatically includes play on words, funny clues where the setter is winking at his victims - us! - and the like, without the help of extra punctuation.
Obviously I was wrong

From this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/03/how-to-solve-cryptic-crossword

"A question mark means the setter is not quite playing by the rules."

Ordinarily in wordplay you'd take the words in the order given (lacking a container indicator or some other indicator of word order). So "randy Conservative" suggests ONHEAT+C. Here the word order indicator (ON) is contained in the definition of RANDY so a ? is used to signal something slightly fishy (ie more fishy than usual!)

OK, printed a copy of this link and I think that thanks to your clear explanation, I have a better idea of the need for '?'
Thanks again