Anne Robinson struck fear into contestants on The Weakest Link with a mere remark. On the road, the Queen of Mean is even more dangerous.

Robinson, 73, admits she recently knocked a delivery rider off his scooter.

Boasting about it in The Oldie magazine, she declares: ‘I am currently transferring a little bit of my deep hatred of London cyclists (no lights on their bikes, routinely ignoring red traffic lights, plus tearing the wrong way down my one-way street in Kensington) to pizza delivery drivers with L-plates.

‘It follows an encounter I had while driving along Kensington Road mid-evening. One of the meals-on-wheels lot came whizzing out of Rutland Gate at high speed. Thus causing him and his Vespa to end in a heap in front of my car.

‘Horrified that I’d done more than slow down deliveries to the starving of Knightsbridge, I leapt out to see how badly injured he was. Yet in the short time this took, the driver, the scooter and the boxes of pizzas had vanished. Relieved I wasn’t going to be unfairly charged with manslaughter, I made my way home.’ Reformed alcoholic Robinson, who earned up to £6 million a year at the peak of her career, adds: ‘Only when I’d parked did I learn it had been a pretty close-run thing. Wedged in the grille in the front of my car was a soggy pizza and half a cardboard pizza box.’

It wasn’t the first motoring difficulty the presenter has suffered. In 2008, she was banned from driving for six months after admitting her fourth speeding offence.

Robinson, who had divorced her second husband, John Penrose, the previous year, was convicted at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court after she confessed that she had driven at 43mph in a 30mph zone.

Theatre-goers in the cheap seats at Quiz, the new West End play about the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? ‘coughing major’ scandal, should listen out for a spot of throat clearing.

Major Charles Ingram and his wife, Diana, found guilty of conspiring to deceive the ITV programme after Charles won the jackpot in 2001, assisted the show. ‘The Ingrams came down to the rehearsal room, which is great,’ says Olivier Award-winning writer James Graham.

‘They are coming to see the play at some point, but we’re going to try to keep that really quiet. Bless them, they’re worried about taking attention away from the show. They want to sit right at the back.’

New Labour’s pet restaurateur Ruth Rogers, whose River Cafe delivered a picnic to Downing Street on Tony Blair’s first day in No 10, is considering running for office in her native America.

‘Now that we have this embarrassingly vulgar president, people say: “Oh, you must be relieved to be away.” But, in a funny way, I’ve never wanted to be there more.’

She adds: ‘I’m very engaged in American politics — it’s in my blood. I feel I would run for office.’

Could it be the right time for the ‘polenta presidency’?