15-05-2025
TOM UTLEY: My 275-mile taxi ride in India ended with the driver in tears - but it was a happier ending than David Lammy's
The longest taxi ride I've ever taken, or am ever likely to take, was a 275-mile round trip from New Delhi to the Taj Mahal in Agra and back.
This was some 35 years ago, when I worked for another paper, whose then editor had decided that I needed cheering up. So he sent me on an all-expenses-paid trip around the world (those were the days!), with instructions to stop off in India, Hong Kong, Sydney, Los Angeles, Washington and New York, and write one article a week about my impressions of each.
Nice work if you can get it.
Well, on that morning in New Delhi, I happened to oversleep, and I missed the bus I'd planned to take to Agra. In normal circumstances, I hasten to say, I would never have dreamed of going such a long distance by taxi instead.
But when my hotel receptionist told me that the return trip would cost no more than the equivalent in rupees of £30 – or rather less than a London black cab charges today for the eight-mile journey from the Mail's office to my south London home – I thought what the hell.
I'd probably never get another opportunity to see the Taj Mahal and, anyway, my employers were unlikely to make a fuss about such a modest bill.
There is no room here to describe in full the profoundly moving experience of that taxi ride – my first proper vision of real poverty and the chasm between the First World and the Third.
No doubt much has changed in India since then, but I will remember to my dying day how we knew we were approaching a human settlement by the powerful smell of sewage that greeted us from at least a mile away.
Then we'd be surrounded by swarms of beggars, tapping on the windows, every time the car slowed to negotiate a gigantic pothole or came to a halt behind a skeletal cow on the road.
I remember, too, how the driver used to stop at every filling station on the way to buy another dribble of petrol. This was because, he told me, the weight of a full tank would mean the car would do fewer miles to the gallon and cost him a few rupees more.
Mortified
And there I sat in the back, with enough money in travellers cheques to feed an entire Indian family for years.
But my most vivid memory is of the moment at the end of our trip when I gave my driver a tip of 100 rupees – then worth a measly £3 – which was the only local currency I had left in my wallet. At this, he folded his arms on the steering wheel, sank his head on to them and burst into convulsive sobs.
I was mortified, thinking I'd been disgracefully mean. But an old India hand, the local correspondent for the Guardian, told me at lunch the following day I was quite wrong.
My driver had been crying tears of joy, he said, because my 100 rupee tip was the amount a Delhi taxi driver would normally expect to clear in at least two full working days of 14 hours each.
(He also told me, by the way, that he would never hire a rickshaw, because he was disgusted by the idea that one human being should be carried along by the pedal power of another. I couldn't help thinking that the rickshaw drivers of Delhi, who depended on pedal power for their livelihoods, would probably not thank him for the purity of his liberal conscience).
Holiday
Anyway, I was reminded of my 275-mile taxi trip yesterday, when I read about the very different experience of Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, when he took a marathon cab-ride of his own.
The details are still slightly hazy. But it appears that trouble arose after Mr Lammy decided to nip off with his wife, the artist Nicola Green, for a private holiday at a skiing resort in the French Alps, having accompanied the King on his state visit to Italy last month.
For this purpose, he hired a taxi service, through the British Embassy in Paris, to take him at his own expense from the airport at Forli in northeastern Italy all the way to Flaine in Haute-Savoie – a six-and-a-half hour drive of no less than 360 miles, according to my Google Maps.
When they eventually arrived, the taxi driver allegedly said the fare had now increased, from the original £717 to £1,305. He is also said to have demanded the extra £588 in cash.
Things then appeared to turn ugly. The driver claims that Mr Lammy turned violent, while Ms Green reportedly told police that, when her husband was in the chalet, the cabbie threatened her by revealing the knife he had concealed in the car.
He then drove off with their luggage still in his boot. The French police became involved, and in the boot of the taxi were reportedly found two diplomatic passports, two car number-plates, a 'coded briefcase' and the Lammys' luggage, with money missing from Ms Green's bag.
The driver has now been sacked by the taxi service and charged with theft.
So should we praise Mr Lammy for standing up against a chancer? Or should we look down on him for denying a working man the proper rate for his job?
As I say, it's all a bit hazy and I will suspend final judgment until the full facts are tested in a French court on November 3.
But two observations spring to mind. One is that our respect for our political class has come to a pretty pass, when so many of us didn't know immediately whom to believe: some random French taxi driver, and suspected thief, or His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (as our passports used to describe his office).
But the really interesting question is this: whatever possessed Mr Lammy to embark on such a marathon taxi ride in the first place?
After all, he must have known that modern European cabbies don't charge the bargain-basement rates on offer in India 35 years ago. And clearly, he's not so stinking rich that a matter of £588 makes no difference to him – or else why would he kick up that fuss?
No. Could his decision to take a cab for the 360-mile trip be explained, I wonder, by his famously dodgy grasp of geography? He was the Celebrity Mastermind contestant, remember, who thought Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution took place in Yugoslavia – a country which had ceased to exist over a decade earlier.
He also managed to get into some confusion last December when he described Libya as 'next door' to Syria. Close. The two countries are separated by the best part of a thousand miles.
King Charles III and UK Secretary of State David Lammy participate in a 'Clean Power for Growth' roundtable during a visit to the Mattatoio on day three of King Charles III and Queen Camilla's State visit to The Republic of Italy on April 9, 2025
Fired
In the same way, did he perhaps fail to realise that Forli and Flaine were in different countries, hundreds of miles apart? 'They're both in Europe, darling, so it can't be more than a short cab-ride.' Oh, well, it's a theory.
As for my own marathon journey, I fear my round-the-world trip didn't last long after my taxi ride in India.
As soon as I arrived at my second stop in Hong Kong, I had a message from the office, saying my editor had been fired, and I was wanted back in London immediately.
One of the charges against my benefactor, I later learned, was his extravagant decision to send Tom Utley round the world at the paper's expense.
Ah, well, he earned my undying gratitude for opening my eyes to the suffering of the world's poorest, and the blessed good fortune of being born British.
