THE man hoping to be the next Liberal Democrat MP for Totnes has been suspended from working as a South Hams councillor for the next three months for bullying a council officer.

Julian Brazil has also been ordered to write a 'grovelling' letter of apology to the woman social security investigator he bullied and to undergo a course of training in the local government code of conduct which he breached.

If he fails to do either of these, he will be suspended from his council duties, and lose all council allowances, for a further month up to the maximum suspension possible of six months.

Mr Brazil is the Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for the Totnes seat which Tory MP Anthony Steen has said he will not be contesting following the national MPs expenses row.

Mr Brazil has also just been re-elected to Devon County Council.

Reading out the 'sentence' handed down by a local standards board panel, the panel chairman Michael Winterton told Mr Brazil that the board took the issue of bullying 'very seriously'.

He accused Mr Brazil of 'arrogance' at an earlier hearing when he had admitted he had not undertaken any training in either the district council or the county council code of conduct and added: "To make the excuse that you were too busy is frankly unacceptable."

After the hearing, a furious Mr Brazil said that writing the letter of apology meant he would 'have to grovel to them'.

And he declared: "South Hams Council has always tried to gag me. They don't like the fact that I see my role as a representative of the local community rather than a representative of the council."

He said he was uncertain whether he would appeal against the decision.

"I will think about it but I have just been through a very tough election and my family has been under a lot of stress. I don't know whether I should put them through it."

The panel took 50 minutes to make up its mind what sanction to impose on Mr Brazil at the end of what was the third separate hearing over the allegations that Mr Brazil bullied district council investigator Chris Butterfield during a confrontation at a bakery in the village of Frogmore.

Mr Brazil denied he had breached the code of conduction at a hearing in April but was found 'guilty' at another hearing in June.

At yesterday's hearing, all Mr Brazil said when asked to make a statement in mitigation was: "I was, in my view, working to represent a member of the public in my electorate. I was doing what I felt was my job."

Mr Winterton said that the wording of the letter of apology Mr Brazil is being ordered to write to Ms Butterfield has to be put together in conjunction with her and the council's monitoring officer.

He said that the suspension included that of Mr Brazil's post as chairman of the Salcombe Harbour Committee.

He said the suspension would start on Friday to give Mr Brazil time to hand over his 'constituency work' to another councillor so that members of public within his Saltstone ward would not suffer.

Mr Winterton told him that bullying was 'unacceptable' and made reference to a recent Adjudication Panel of England hearing where a Dartmouth councillor was disqualified from being a councillor for three years after he was found to have bullied his town clerk.

Mr Brazil rejected the comparison as ridiculous saying that the Dartmouth case had involved bullying going back years.

He said that he believed that members of the public had made their feelings clear about the accusations levelled at him when they re-elected him as a county councillor just a fortnight ago.