"You Suck! No, YOU Suck!!"

The Barking and Dagenham Post (story not in online edition) reports on an unseemly bit of behaviour between two children:

"Little Liam admits telling little Susie 'You could do with losing some weight, you fat old cow'"

Shocking behaviour! But little Susie isn't above a spot of provocation:

"If she had been kind and courteous to me throughout the day, then I would have been the same with her, but instead she put two fingers up at me and started chanting 'four nil, four nil'"

Oh, wait! I've been reading it wrong.

It isn't about two children at all, it's actually about the unseemly spat between councillor Liam Smith, the deputy leader of Barking and Dagenham, and Sue Connelly, the mother of Conservative councillor Neil Connelly, on the night that the Conservatives took back the Chadwell Heath ward from Labour. Hence the 'four nil' chant, which according to the paper, refers to the number of times Labour candidate Margaret Mullane has lost seats she has stood for against the Conservatives.

Still, an easy mistake to make...

The paper reports that the incident has been reported to the council's Monitoring Officer and Neil Connelly is said to be intending to demand an apology at the next meeting of the Assembly on July 23rd.

And if that doesn't work, no doubt he'll be lying in wait for Liam behind the tuck shop!