A Royal wedding partygoer who pinched the bottom of a woman he thought was wearing a fancy dress police outfit got a shock when she turned out to be a real policewoman.

Ryan Pitt had been drinking all day on April 29 and was in a nightclub when two police officers in uniform arrived.

As they were going upstairs, he pinched the policewoman’s bottom and she turned round, held him by the throat and arrested him.

“He said, ‘I only grabbed your bottom.

“I thought you were a member of the public’,” Mary Wallace, prosecuting, told Worcester Crown Court.

Miss Wallace said he thought she was wearing fancy dress and “wanted a laugh”.

Pitt, a 35-year-old self-employed steel erector and labourer from Blanchard Close, Leominster, pleaded guilty to a charge of sexual assault.

Edward Hetherington, defending, said it was royal wedding day and a public holiday and Pitt had been drinking from 8am until the incident in the Leominster nightclub at 9.25pm.

“There were people dressed up and he thought she might be a reveller.

He didn’t realise she was a police officer,” Mr Hetherington said.

“He didn’t mean it in a sexual way but he accepts it was a sexual act.”

Judge Patrick Thomas told Pitt: “The suggestion you can pinch a woman’s bottom and it not be a sexual act is childish and insulting.

“You would not do it to a man. Women are not to be treated in this way just because you are drunk and out for a laugh.”

He gave Pitt a community service order for 60 hours of unpaid work to be completed in six months.

He was also ordered to pay £100 compensation to the policewoman and £250 costs.