JUST days after revealing his youthful drug use, Henley MP Boris Johnson has told how he used to ignore parking tickets when at Oxford University.

In Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars, published this week, Mr Johnson wrote that he just let the parking tickets pile up until they disintegrated in the rain on the windscreen of his old Fiat 128 - dubbed the Italian Stallion - as it had Belgian licence plates.

In Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars, he writes: "A Fiat 128 two-door saloon, 1.2 litres, the Italian Stallion was the trusty steed that emancipated me from the shackles of childhood.

"Before traffic wardens became bonus-hungry maniacs, and when it was still rare for a student to own any kind of car at all, I parked all over the place, my favourite spot in Oxford being the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk.

"Sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket. But what did I care? The Stallion had Belgian plates.

"I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until - in the days before they were even sheathed in plastic - the fines just disintegrated in the rain."

In his book, published this week, Mr Johnson also shares his loathing of the growing number of rules and regulations governing motorists' behaviour.

Although promising not to "make a fuss" about new laws banning the use of handheld mobile phones in cars, the Tory MP points out: "Driving and telephoning is not fundamentally different from using your free hand to pick your nose, hit the children or turn the radio from Magic FM to something less glutinous."