Guess who's riling Zille now

Just when Helen Zille thought she was onto puppet Chester Missing's antics, she's walked into the trap she suggested singer Steve Hofmeyr was too blind to see.

In her online newsletter piece titled "Racism is not free speech. It is an offence" on Sunday, the DA leader said that, before the Hofmeyr-Missing Twitter fight had intensified into a court battle, "most South Africans had never heard of [Missing]".

Zille wrote: "After [Missing] won a court case, and became the poster-pop for anti-racists, he became a national hero.

"But maybe the laugh's on us. Chester knows there is nothing like a running battle with racists to send your career into orbit. Maybe he did a deal with Steve and Dan to share the royalties in perpetuity."

Since then Zille and Missing (or his ventriloquist, Conrad Koch) have been swapping taunts - just the way he likes it, if Zille's own assessment is to be believed.

On Monday, Missing tweeted: "Today we learned that @helenzille thinks apartheid wasn't so bad. Damn, that's gonna sound good at voting time."

When Jacques Maree, a copywriter for the DA according to his Twitter bio, said Missing loved "dishing out" but didn't like being "exposed", Missing replied: "Ps, lemme know when YOU had a warrant of arrest being held against u by the country's biggest bigot [sic]."

Zille replied: "I'm glad you never had to actually stand up against the Real Thing, apartheid in the 1970s/80s!"

Neither had to say anything further, with other Twitter users getting involved.

@jennyJBK, commented: "We are now at stage 3 of dealing with the psychoanalysis of @chestermissing behaviour."

Zille replied: "Way beyond that. He shed his load entirely ."

@KMoshole said to Zille: "How stupid 2 challenge an antiracist, u must be aiming 2 lose blk votes", and she hit back: "No, I'm not, but I am certainly aiming to lose people who deliberately distort things from my TL. Goodbye."

And just like that, Zille failed to unSteve herself.