A woman has been jailed for supplying party drugs to bars and clubs in Manchester’s Gay Village.

But wagon driver Michelle Hobin’s racket was exposed after police stopped her Ford Fiesta and found a trove of ecstasy, ketamine and mephedrone with a street value of £2,208 in the boot and glove compartment.

Officers pulled over the 27-year-old and fellow drug dealer Graeme Crawford after spotting the car driving along Richmond Street in the city centre just after midnight on December 22, 2013, a court heard.

Hobin’s bouncer girlfriend Catherine Holmes, 31, was alerted to Hobin’s arrest and agreed to move a rucksack with cash and drugs from their Newton Heath home to a self service lock-up at the nearby Riverpark Trading estate.

But police who searched the vehicle uncovered a ‘dealer’s list’ which included the name of the lock up where they discovered the rucksack and its contents.

In all, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine and mephedrone worth nearly £6,000 and nearly £10,000 in cash was found.

Prosecutor Gavin Howie told Manchester Crown Court how shop worker Crawford, originally from Belfast, appeared to be ‘testing the market’ by selling drugs for Hobin according to text messages between the pair uncovered by police,

Hobin, who worked as an HGV driver for Argos, had started taking drugs when she was 18 as she was ‘struggling to come to terms with her sexuality and had difficulties with her father’, said Joanna Rodkiss, defending.

Hobin, of Ashton-under-Lyne, was jailed for 18 months after she pleaded guilty to four counts of possessing drugs with intent to supply.

The judge, Mr Recorder Winston Hunter QC, dismissed pleas to hand down a community sentence, ruling that ‘this defendant was substantially involved in the supply of drugs in the city centre of Manchester within the community with which she identifies herself, namely the gay and lesbian community and the club culture of Manchester’.

Holmes, also of Ashton-under-Lyne, admitted the same charges but she was handed a twelve-month suspended prison sentence. She had a ‘very limited role’, said the judge. She was also ordered to carry out 100 hours unpaid work and was handed a six-month supervision order.

Crawford, from Salford, was jailed for nine months after he admitted two counts of possession of drugs with intent to supply and one count of possessing drugs. He had been an ‘active participant with Hobin’, according to the judge.