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The deputy leader of Ashfield District Council ‘bullied’ his neighbours before 'squealing in a very theatrical way' while falsely accusing one of them of chasing him with a carving knife, a court has heard.

Coun Tom Hollis (Ash Ind) claimed his neighbour on Windmill Close, Huthwaite, initially offered him out for a fight in May 2020, but prosecutor Mark Fielding said: “I’m suggesting it's the opposite.”

“It was you that made threats and invited him to the front of the house for a good hiding,” he told Hollis. “You say you wanted to defuse the situation. Today you admitted saying ‘I think I could beat him in a fight’.”

Hollis, who denies two counts of harassment without violence at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court, said: “It was a throwaway comment. He was very enraged. I went inside to defuse the situation.”

Mr Fielding said: “As a professional politician, you don’t do throwaway comments and you said that deliberately to wind him up.”

He said 29-year-old Hollis was unable to show a key piece of video evidence, because it showed him accusing his neighbour of being a paedophile.

During one argument, Hollis, district council member for Huthwaite & Brierley and Nottinghamshire County Council member for Sutton West, stood on a coffee table in his back garden because ‘you needed to dominate your neighbours’.

Mr Fielding told him: “You have not produced anything to show your neighbours have threatened you. Other internet warriors latched on to this stuff and made threats.

“Surely all we have here is the rather unpleasant rough and tumble of politics.”

Ashfield Council deputy leader’s ‘every move was reported on Facebook’, trial he...

The court heard Hollis, now of Yew Tree Drive, Huthwaite, ‘petulantly’ blocked his neighbours’ drive with a caravan and threatened to build a two-feet wall around their property to wind them up.

He said further letters Hollis sent his neighbours, after they asked him not to, ‘were weasel words from a politician papering your file against future complaints’.

Coun Jason Zadrozny-Bland, council leader, told the court Hollis was ‘one of the most diligent councillors I have’ and described going around once, on May 2, to borrow his car, so he could deliver food parcels during lockdown.

He said Hollis’s female neighbour was ‘really angry’ and shouted: “You can't come around here s******* your boyfriend.”

Coun Zadrozny-Bland said: “They're not words I've heard since the schoolyard.

"As I was reversing, she was still in the doorway, shouting.”

The trial continues.

Ashfield councillor bullied neighbours and ‘deliberately wound them up’