A drunk bus conductor illegally got behind the wheel of a double decker bus and crashed it on a bomb site after driving several miles.

The 22-year-old, of Pemberton Gardens, Upper Holloway, had finished his shift when he got an urge to drive the bus in Holloway Road.

He crashed into a stationary taxi, doing £46 of damage, before continuing to Rotherhithe, south-east London, and crashing into the bomb site.

The man was fined £10 and put on probation for a year. Magistrate Frank Milton told him at Highbury Corner: “Driving a bus when drunk is about as dangerous a thing as one could possibly imagine.

“It is not all that strange an impulse because most of us rather fancy ourselves as driving a bus. But we don’t yield to the fancy, fortunately for the population at large.

“You will clearly have to pull yourself together. I don’t think at the moment you ought to take out any vehicle, least of all a bus.

“Yor impulse has got to be controlled.”