A drink driver who answered ‘do I f***’ when he was asked by police if he’d provide a breath sample has been jailed.

Daryn Wallis, 38, was arrested in Caversfield, near Bicester, after crashing his converted Renault camper van into a Mercedes Sprinter on Friday, October 8.

Tests at the roadside showed the Bridgend railway worker was more than three times the drink drive limit, blowing 127mcgs of alcohol in 100ml of breath.

But when Wallis was taken to Banbury and asked to blow into the police station breathalyser machine he refused. In reply to the officers’ requests for a breath sample, he told them: “Do I f***?”

Appearing before Oxford Magistrates’ Court via video link from Banbury police station on Saturday, Wallis, of St Thomas Close, Brackla, Bridgend, pleaded guilty to failing to provide a breath sample and driving without a licence.

The court heard he had four previous convictions for drink driving and, in 2017, was banned from the roads for three years. He had failed to apply to get his licence back when his last driving disqualification ran out.

Jailing him for 12 weeks and banning him from the roads for five years, chairman of the bench Ray Cross said: “We’ve thought very seriously about this matter and we feel there is no alternative at this stage other than immediate custody.

“This is your fourth drink driving offence, therefore you have a disregard for the law. There was an accident that was caused. We believe that you were driving deliberately. You knew the consequences but you drove.”

Leanne Ballato, mitigating, had asked the magistrates to consider adjourning the case so Wallis could speak to the probation service for a pre-sentence report.

The Bridgend man was living in his converted campervan during the week while working on the railways in Oxfordshire, she said.

On October 8 - the day of the crash - her client had spent the day with a friend at a nearby airfield. “He cannot recall entirely where he was going. He was surprised that he had been drinking and driving his van on that particular occasion.”

Despite previous convictions for drink driving, he had not worked with the probation service in the past. He had emphysema, having smoked 30 cigarettes a day since he was 12, which put him at greater risk of contracting coronavirus in prison.

Wallis was ordered to pay £213 in costs and surcharge.

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