I blame Matthew d’Ancona, esteemed editor of this organ, for his over-generous hospitality. It was after one of The Spectator’s pre-Christmas celebrations that I was breathalysed and banned from driving for a year, later reduced to nine months if I underwent counselling. It all started when, as an occasional Spectator scribe since 1974, I received a last-minute invitation to a dinner for readers to meet contributors. It was 6 p.m. and I was in the Evening Standard’s offices in Kensington. The dinner was at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, at 7.15, and I had to get home to Camberwell six miles away to change into a dinner jacket.
As I later told Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court, I was full of remorse and regret about what happened, especially as I have a freedom pass. I was caught out by a bizarre sequence of events. When I got home I found our next-door neighbour, a lady in her mid-fifties, being beaten up by a gang of hoodies on my doorstep. She was trying to ring our bell because there was no one in her house. They were holding a knife to her throat, punching her in the face and kicking her. When they saw me, they ran off and I chased them, accompanied by my son, who had heard the noise. We soon lost them and returned to the house, where we called the police. They came round quickly but I was still hopelessly late for the dinner, so I decided to take my scooter.
When I got to Chelsea hospital, still shaking and sweating, I was offered a large drink, then another one or two. Spectator readers listened sympathetically to my traumatic experiences that evening and suggested another glass of wine. When I left the party at around midnight, the man at the gate said I couldn’t leave the scooter inside the gardens, and there were no legal parking places outside on the Chelsea embankment. The only answer was to ride three miles home. It was at Clapham North that I encountered temporary traffic lights where they were digging up the road. The lights were very slow in changing so I gingerly crept past them with no traffic in either direction. However, a police car was lying in wait.
Back at Brixton police station, I spotted the officers I had seen earlier and asked why the police didn’t spend more time chasing criminals and less time trapping motorcyclists. This was not a sensible approach, I was later told, and I didn’t mention it at the magistrates’ court, although I did point out that I have an epileptic daughter, aged 18, who sometimes has seizures at awkward times in the night and needs to be collected by car. Also, my mother is 90 and living alone in Battersea, and needs me to take her shopping occasionally.
And so to the national probation service in Camden Town, where Pamela and Petrina, cheerful ladies of African ancestry, run five-hour drink-drive rehabilitation courses every Friday. Our group consisted of four women and 12 men, and a fine cross-section of cosmopolitan life they were. In discussions about our motoring experiences we were to learn about road rage and attitudes to drink-driving in Nigeria, Ghana, India, Thailand, Sicily, Spain, the US and South Africa. In Sweden it’s zero tolerance, I’m told. I could go on about the strange situations my new friends had found themselves in behind the wheel, but I’d better stick to my own experiences.
On the first day we were invited to divide into groups of four and discuss mitigating factors and aggravating circumstances. Arguing with a policeman is bad form in this country, although elsewhere, I’m told, it’s normal procedure. Failing to provide a specimen is very incriminating, although one poor fellow said he had offered a specimen but the machine didn’t work. I suggested riding a scooter when drunk was not as bad as driving a powerful car, as the only person likely to be hurt was myself. This went down very badly. Had I not heard of motorcyclists mounting the pavement and killing pedestrians and small children in pushchairs? A drunk driver is committing a crime, whatever they are driving, said Petrina.
A popular excuse for drink-driving was emergencies, such as taking a pregnant woman to hospital. This cut no ice with Pamela, who said a man should know that his wife is expecting, and should act as a responsible adult. When I explained that two of our children were born so quickly that I missed their births completely — one of them was delivered on a hospital trolley — she was unforgiving, saying that if she were paid £1 for every time she had heard this excuse, she’d be a rich woman.
It soon became apparent that you do not argue with these ladies, friendly and smiling though they may be. They had ways of separating the good boys and girls from the bad, often recalling things they had said in previous sessions. It was when I argued that my own situation was just bad luck, a complex sequence of unexpected events, that I found myself in serious trouble. ‘You’ll be put in a corner for that,’ whispered my neighbour Craig, who has given up booze completely. ‘Can you share that with us, Craig?’ said Pamela.
I was told there were several points in the evening of the Spectator party when I could have planned my life more sensibly, such as when I agreed to go, when I got on the scooter, and when I came home again. Planning is everything, Pamela told me. It was a mercy, really, that the discussion moved on and I didn’t get a chance to say the police should have been chasing hoodies that evening, not me.
We were presented with scenarios, some real, some imaginary, to see how we would have acted differently. One of the team had been drinking at Glasgow airport because he and his son had been delayed for four hours while waiting for a flight to Luton. He drank more wine on the plane and later took a taxi to London. It was late that night when he got in his car to take his aged dog to the park 500 yards away and was caught by police when, on the way home, he stopped to buy cigarettes. I said he should have fetched a wheelbarrow for the dog, and to have gone into a shop when the police were there. This was the wrong answer.
I like to think my contributions led to a more lively discussion. When presented with moral dilemmas, our group sometimes became reckless. What would you do if you were a student and, the day before an exam, your friendly lecturer offers you a copy of the questions? Why, we’d photocopy them and sell them of course. Poor Pamela clutched her forehead in despair. We were given graphs to show how men and women differ in the units of alcohol they can drink, the damage it does to the liver and the brain, and how long the body takes to get rid of it. We were shown horrifying videos presented by Sir Trevor McDonald, Michael Buerk and Alexei Sayle portraying the trauma that can be caused by drink-driving. I’m afraid I scored nil points for saying Sayle should not have been looking sideways and talking to camera while driving a car. But it did raise a laugh.
We were warned that, if you are banned from driving, police can arrest you for being near your car with your car keys in your pocket, and they’ve been known to mark tyres of a banned driver’s car with chalk to see if it has been moved. At the end of the last session, a splendid circular chart was produced showing ‘Stages in the Process of Change’ such as No thought (no problem), Thinking (gains and losses), Decision (control of alcohol intake), Active change (learning to say No), Continue (sticking to decisions), and Relapse (re-offend). Although I put myself in Active change, Petrina very decisively moved me back to Thinking — at the bottom of the class.
We all received certificates saying we had passed. Mine can go on the wall beside the one which says I once completed the Devizes to Westminster canoe race. Afterwards, half of us adjourned to the pub opposite to compare notes, when we saw two faces looking through the window, smiling and waving. It was Petrina and Pamela. We should have asked them in for a drink but we didn’t quite have the nerve.