Diary Of An ADI

William Houghton, 18, only passed his test 6 months ago, and had only had his Citroen Saxo for two weeks, when he lost control of his car driving at “about 50mph” (his own words) and injured two of his passengers. Both were hospitalised.

Houghton, who admitted driving without due care and attention on June 7, had passed his test six months earlier and had only had the Citroen for two weeks.

Houghton told the court he was very sorry for what he had done, thought he had been driving at about 50mph and put the accident down to inexperience.

Magistrates were suckered right in, and “applied discretion” in awarding him only 5 points, instead of 6, so that he wouldn’t be automatically banned and forced to take his test again. He was fined a total of over £300.

I’m sorry, but it’s a complete joke. There are new drivers out there who really do deserve a break, and yet don’t get one. But for luck, Houghton could have been apologising for killing two passengers. He had played out the new driver accident script to the letter.

Police in Edinburgh have launched an enquiry after a motorist was caught on camera eating a bowl of cereal while driving through the city centre. He was overtaking cyclists while he was doing it.

The car he’s driving looks like a Corsa, so I guess that puts it down to some sort of genetic problem.

The idiot deserves everything that is coming to him (assuming he gets caught). But it’s also worth pointing out that the video has been plastered all over the internet by the cyclist – called “Raging Bike” – who took it, along with various comments about the speed he was doing. I hope they had a calibrated speed gun in order to make the accusation about him exceeding 30mph (35mph is mooted).

Let’s also hope that the rightful prosecution of one blinkered idiot hasn’t been prejudiced by others.

If you Google “Raging Bike”, you’ll find that the person who crops up is not exactly pro-motorist. In fact, on one site where he is interviewed you get the impression that he is the character portrayed by Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies (particularly Rambo I and II) – except on a bike instead of an army truck or assault helicopter.

You’d think that being over the drink drive limit, having no licence, and no insurance would mean that you’d give the police a wide berth if you were driving past them.

Mind you, to get like that in the first place you’d probably have had a certain kind of upbringing – and therefore if you saw your father, for example, as you drove by, and noticed that he had been stopped by the police for some reason, then you might decide to go and poke your nose in and see if you could “help” (even though there is no recorded case of some caveman ever managing to successfully “help” another caveman when he has interfere with police business like this).

And this is what happened to Leon Fitzpatrick from Sunderland. He’d been on the booze the night before and as he was driving to work he saw that his father had been pulled over. Up to this point the police weren’t even aware of his existence. But then he decided to go and poke his nose in, and that was when the officers noticed the smell of alcohol on his breath. Naturally, routine checks then identified the breaches of licence conditions.

His defence lawyer was Anna Haq – a name which I recognise from a story not long ago, but which I haven’t bothered to look up. Her pathetic mitigating comments were:

He would never have been arrested if he had not got out of that vehicle, there was no evidence of bad driving.

Ah, well that’s OK then. He could have then just gone and driven through a school crossing and everything would have been fine.

He was banned for 14 months and fined a total of £215.