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Half the members of a council, including its mayor, have resigned in protest after a meeting that descended into chaos and saw some leave in floods of tears.

Seven of the 14 members of Beaumaris town council quit after a meeting at the town hall on Monday night.

There is reportedly a split in the council but when the Daily Post spoke to several councillors on both sides of the divide, no one would explain what it was actually about.

One member of the public who was at the meeting, and who was excluded along with all other non-council attendees before the row broke out, told the Daily Post what he had seen.

He described how, three quarters of an hour after they had been asked to leave, one councillor was seen running out in tears closely followed by another, who called all the other councillors in the chamber "s***s".

He said: "Some of the councillors were overheard saying they would have to resign and there would have to be new elections. I have seen arguments before at council meetings but nothing like this.”

Two independent members of the public who were at the meeting told the Daily Post the conflict was understood to have centred around discussion of the potential suspension of long-serving town council clerk Professor Trevor Ashenden.

But while he declined to explain what the row was over, he said no-one at the town hall had the authority to do so.

He said: “Councillors have never voted to suspend me. What I have done is I have spoken to the monitoring officer and to the electoral officers at the Anglesey about holding elections and I have formally accepted the resignations.

“Nobody had any authority to suspend me, I heard people saying I was going to be suspended, the whole row is about so much fighting which I have got stuck in the middle of. No council meeting has ever resolved to suspend me.”