THE Labour council leader who was branded a “dick” by his SNP rival earlier in the week has been forced to apologise after leaking confidential information to the press.

Stephen McCabe, the leader of Inverclyde Council, says he provided material sent to him about the upcoming budget by the SNP’s Chris McEleny in error.

READ MORE: SNP councillor Chris McEleny insists that Labour council leader is in fact a 'dick'

McEleny sent his group’s budget proposals to McCabe ahead of a meeting set to take place on Monday.

The message was marked as sensitive and was supposed to be kept confidential.

The suggestions – including a refusal to back cuts to CCTV funding, community wardens and music teaching – were published in The National’s sister paper the Greenock Telegraph yesterday.

McCabe accused McEleny of ignoring a local consultation on savings, adding: “The Labour group will wait until we see the responses to the consultation before entering into an honest and frank discussion with the other groups on the council as to how we agree a budget that has the least damaging impact on our community.”

However, the council boss had to issue an apology to McEleny and officials after the leak was reported to the local authority’s legal team.

In a letter, Gerard Malone, head of legal and property services at the council, said: “It has been explained to me that a genuine mistake has occurred in that Councillor McCabe discerned nothing in the content of the email to require that it not be shared.”

The message explained that McCabe had believed that the budget proposals would be made public by the SNP.

However, Malone continued that it was “reasonable” to expect that it would be treated as “private and confidential” due to being marked as “sensitive” in line with official policies.

The matter arose after the pair clashed on social media earlier this week.

McEleny had called McCabe a “dick” on Twitter. McCabe then went to The Herald to say he hoped that McEleny would say sorry for the name calling, but said he was “not sure he has it in his character to apologise”.

The exchange took place after a public spat over the upcoming budget vote on the council.

McEleny claimed that the council had been provided with the SNP’s alternative plan to what McCabe, the council leader, was setting out.

McCabe stated that McEleny “wants us to ignore the views of our residents and our staff and just get on and agree £ms of cuts…” at which point the SNP councillor asked “Do you go out of your way to come across as a dick at all times or is it natural?”

McCabe, affronted at the very thought of being called a dick, then spoke to The Herald newspaper and told them he was “very disappointed” such language was used.

Defending his position, McEleny said that McCabe’s behaviour was actually pretty much the definition of being a dick.

He said: “I think the guy has sent me something like over 100 messages late at night over the past while on Twitter. It’s certainly the sort of behaviour that the colloquialism implied.

“However it’s really not an issue I’ll be giving any further thought to when I’m in the process of trying to set our councils budget for the coming year.

“If I was offering any advice to Stephen, he perhaps should be spending more time concentrating on that late at night instead of this weird obsession he has of contacting me to somehow relate everything that’s gone wrong in the world to the SNP and me.”