The shy, retiring supermodel and occasional moral crusadee has parted company with £45,000 to get her hands on one of LTI's taxi cabs - a LTI-TX4, for those who like to keep abreast of these things. In recent days she's been papped rattling her hackney carriage around Hackney and other parts of town, ferrying celebrity chummettes from pub to boozer to watering hole and back to alehouse again, regaling them with dubiously wrought vexations on modern life and waxing loquaciously about those bloody foreigners pinching British jobs. The diligent folk at the Mail On Sunday have even prepared a photo gallery showing Kate behind the wheel, bless 'em.

Kate won't, however, escape the bane of modern London motoring, the congestion charge: despite the fare-paying fraternity being exempt, privately owned taxi cabs are not. Until she bones up on The Knowledge and starts picking up fares between Camden and Primrose Hill, she'll need to fork out the money like the rest of us mortals.

Image from mockney_piers' Flickrstream