DRIVING USED TO BE SUCH FUN, A LONG JOURNEY WAS SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO, BUT NOT ANYMORE

“I JUST CAN’T FACE THE M1 ANY MORE. IT ISN’T THE ROAD TO HELL. IT IS HELL. IT’S LIKE EAST GERMANY IN 1968”

When Mr Cameron came to power nearly fve years ago, he and his team announced that they would end New Labour’s relentless war on the motorist and, as a sign of things to come, promptly abolished the absurd M4 bus lane.

Soon afterwards, amid much fanfare, the same team announced that they were looking into the possibility of raising the motorway speed limit to 80mph and allowing people to pull up on a yellow line if they were only stopping for a packet of fags. We were all very pleased and thought: “At this rate, Corvette Stingrays will soon be given away for free on the NHS.”

But, instead of doing these things, the various Ministers for Transport have simply sat on their fat arses doing – how did James put it in the recent Patagonia special – the square root of jack s**t. Which is why, tomorrow, I shall be going to Leeds on the train.

I just can’t face the M1 any more. It isn’t the road to hell. It is hell. It’s like East Germany in 1968, only with more surveillance and even longer queues.

At the bottom end, near London, every gantry is festooned with cameras, to make sure you adhere to whatever idiotic speed limit some moron in a “control centre” has decided is appropriate at that particular moment, and you can be assured that it’s always about 40mph too low, even if it’s raining and you are driving a Ford Anglia with see-through brakes.

Then you emerge from the Big Brother section into the Midlands where there are roadworks which stretch from where you are to the end of time. And to make sure you don’t run over any of the workforce, who plainly aren’t there or the job would have been completed about 14 years ago, you are limited to 50. And to make sure you do 50, there are average-speed cameras.

And then you’re in the North, which means that you are jockeying for position in the outside lane with half a million overseas-registered Dacias which are being driven by people who’ve never experienced tarmac before and think that the speed limit is the top speed of their car. Which is about 42. By the time you get to Leeds, everyone has given you up for dead, held a funeral, sent fowers and gone home to grieve. And it’s not just the M1, either. No motorway works properly, and soon, things are going to get a lot worse.

This is because new hidden speed cameras are being deployed, and unlike those already seen on motorways, they won’t simply be turned on when the limit is lowered – they’ll be on all the time, even in the middle of the night, in June, when the trafc is light and the surface is dry.

Some police services are so keen on this money-making plan, they’ve decided not to wait for the new tech and have simply brought their old-fashioned cameras out of the store room. According to the RAC, around 5,500 drivers have already been nicked this way in Avon and Somerset alone.

And, according to The Sunday Times, Hertfordshire police will not even say whether they will be using cameras to enforce the 70mph limit, claiming it’s not in the public interest. How East German is that?

Meanwhile, away from the motorways, you have other normal roads which are lined with civil servants in speed vans, watching YouPorn while their cameras catch people

doing nothing wrong. And the cities with low-emission zones and Stasi ofcers in high-visibility jackets giving you a fne if you pull over to buy a pint of milk.

End the war on the motorist? Pah. The Tories have made it nuclear. Happily, however, they have kickstarted the economy, which means it’s a little easier to start up your own business, which gives me an idea...

Let’s look at the alternatives to the car. There’s the train, which is extremely expensive. It now costs more to go by rail to Leeds than it does to stay where you are and buy a house. Then there’s the bus, which is full of disease and drunk people who want to stick a knife in your heart. We can discount the bicycle, obviously, which leaves us with one option – get someone else to do the driving.

In London, there are two types of driver. You have a chap who’s just arrived from a country you’ve never heard of, whose car smells faintly of lavender oil and sick, who doesn’t know where he’s going and can’t get there anyway because he never puts more than £2 worth of fuel in the tank of his car. Then you have someone in a suit in a smart black Mercedes S-Class who does know where he’s going and is very polite but he charges around £7,500 a mile.

Which causes me to wonder. Why has no one started a business renting out drivers? Just people who will come round and drive the car you already own? Seriously, why pay someone to drive you around in his car when you already have one?

That’s what I want: someone who’ll risk the points on his licence while I sit in the back and watch movies on my iPad.

All he or she needs is some kind of insurance, a smart smiley face, an ability to talk when the passenger wants to talk and not to talk when the passenger doesn’t, a rudimentary knowledge of Britain, and fragrant armpits. And there are loads of people who ft that bill.

The only drawback to this otherwise brilliant plan is that whenever I drive with someone else, they aren’t very good at it. This even applies when I’m close to home. James May, for instance, is very careful and smooth but getting anywhere takes a fortnight. Then there’s Richard Hammond who is so busy swearing at every other road user, he misses gears and hits stuf.

Further afield, we fnd people who speed up for no reason and then brake because the speed they’ve created is frightening them. And others who swerve around obstacles that aren’t there. Or who are so busy fiddling with the stereo controls, they don’t see much of anything at all. Some people are so terrible at driving that if I employed one of them to drive me to Leeds, I wouldn’t even get to Milton Keynes before I told him to get in the back and drove myself.

Perhaps this is why the Government feels the need to wage war on drivers; because collectively we’re no good at it.

There is, however, a solution to that... a solution that would make the roads safer, faster and less congested: make the driving test a lot harder. No, really. You can’t play Premier League football unless you are good at kicking a ball. You can’t do eye surgery unless you have a steady hand and a cool nerve. So why should you be allowed to drive if it’s not really your thing?

I doubt that will happen any time soon, so, in the meantime, if you have a smile and clean armpits, can drive smoothly and know where Leeds is, then send me your details. I may have a job for you.

“IT NOW COSTS MORE TO GO BY RAIL TO LEEDS THAN IT DOES TO STAY WHERE YOU ARE AND BUY A HOUSE”