An obsessive bully rammed his van into a car carrying his ex-girlfriend and a toddler because she refused to let him go shopping with her.

Controlling Adam Pryce, 23, followed his former partner as she drove to Canterbury from Broadstairs with a friend and a 13-month-old child.

A jury at Canterbury Crown Court heard how Pryce menaced Katie Campbell throughout the journey, shunting her car on a number of occasions.

Now Pryce, of Royal Close, Broadstairs has been jailed for 15 months after a jury convicted him of driving dangerously in July last year.

Judge Rupert Lowe told him: “You were an obsessive and controlling partner. You intimidated her even knowing she had a friend and baby inside the car.

“Such was the level of your obsessive fury that you did not care and only stopped when the police sent a patrol. It is uncomfortable to think what might have happened had officers not arrived.”

Prosecutor Ben Irwin told the jury how Miss Campbell had been in a relationship with Pryce for four years.

But it ended after a series of phone calls and Pryce turned nasty, bombarding her with abusive texts demanding she come to his home.

She had decided to go to the Mole Country Store in Broad Oak Road, Canterbury, but Pryce followed in his three-and-a-half-tonne van.

He overtook Miss Campbell’s vehicle, swerving and trying to make her stop in a “bullying and intimidatory” manner.

On a dual-carriageway, the van rammed into the car at low speed, “designed to terrify the women and child”, the judge told him.

“He pestered her and became wound up because she didn’t want to see him," he said. "He made at least 50 phone calls which she refused to answer."

At the store, while Miss Campbell was shopping, Pryce took the hubcaps from her car “as a joke” and put them into the back of his van. He denied stealing them and was acquitted by the jury.

Judge Lowe said Miss Campbell did not think it was funny and he viewed it as another way of Pryce trying to control her.

Pryce, who denied driving dangerously, claimed he had not rammed her car or intimidated her, even when confronted by camera footage that on at least four occasions be was between one and two seconds behind her vehicle.