I could not resist commenting on the banning of Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, Merydydd Hughes. He had been caught speeding in north Wales in May of this year, clocked at 90mph on the A5, near Wrexham, which has a 60mph limit.Mr Hughes, famously, has previously worked as the Chairman of Roads Policing at the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), and has argued that "less conspicuous" speed cameras would work to prevent speeding and bring down accident rates.
That is the nature of our modern public servants – hypocrisy on legs, but there is a particularly personal issue here. Mr Hughes's officers are known to infest the section of the M1 on their patch, specifically targeting "speeding" drivers.
It was there, in good weather on an otherwise empty motorway at just gone midnight, that I got picked up by a particularly officious member of his force, for doing 82 mph – an offence that got me a six month ban under the totting-up procedure.
Unlike Mr Hughes, of course, I did not have a chauffeur-driven car so a ban was a real hardship – to say nothing of the fine - so forgive me if I wish Mr Hughes all the worst, and wish he'd got six years and been fired into the bargain.
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