A bar manager told today how one of George Osborne’s senior aides was acting like a “drunken idiot” before he was arrested following a fracas.
Mario Thomas Pisani, 34, was detained after an incident at the Adventure bar in Battersea Rise, where he is alleged to have abused staff and customers during a drunken tirade.
Mr Pisani, who has worked as a speechwriter for George Osborne and in the private office of former chancellor Alistair Darling, has now been suspended from his £50,000-a-year job in the Treasury press office.
Adventure manager Scott Kaye claimed the junior civil servant hurled a glass and was “rude and arrogant” while at the bar on November 9.
Mr Pisani, appeared at South Western magistrates’ court today , where he denied a public order offence. He now faces a trial over the alleged offence.
Mr Kaye said: “He launched a glass on the floor and he was asked to leave. I understood that he thought of himself as some big, powerful bloke, but essentially he was just another drunken idiot.
“I deal with people like him every now and again, but he was being generally rude and arrogant to other people. When we chucked him out he started to have a go at one of the Polish door staff.”
Mr Pisani was confronted by police, who were carrying out alcohol licence checks in the area. Mr Kaye added: “When he started shouting at the doorman, they got involved.”
A 28-year-old unnamed woman was cautioned for assault on a female police officer in relation to the same incident, after she and Mr Pisani were taken to a south London police station.
A spokesman for the Treasury said: “We do not comment on specific staffing matters.”
