Leonardo DiCaprio has one, and so does Cameron Diaz. Now Sandra and Michael Howard have joined the club of celebrities showing they care for the planet by driving a Toyota Prius. Equipped with electric batteries as well as a petrol engine, the car will return 65mpg with little pollution.

Michael Howard is on hand to reverse it up the drive and park while his, and its, photograph is taken. He’s well briefed on its environmental benefits. “It depends entirely on how you drive it,” he says. “If it’s driven hard the fuel consumption drops quite noticeably, but if you drive it carefully it’s very economical indeed.”

And in case you’re wondering whether the car was a gift from Toyota delivered for the publicity, it wasn’t. It is a genuine second-hand bargain with 11,000 miles on the clock. The Howards spotted it at a local dealership and bought it to replace a Ford Scorpio they’d had for 10 years. They paid £16,000.

Sandra Howard is having fun learning to drive it but admits it misbehaved on the day we meet. The batteries were dead and it wouldn’t start. “I had to get the Toyota dealer to charge it up. It could happen to any car that the battery goes flat, but it would have to happen on the day we were being photographed.

“I was sorry to say goodbye to the Ford. It had become a member of the family. But Michael loves this new car.”

How can that be? The take-no-prisoners Tory leader, who as a younger man drove Lotuses, and crashed one, is suddenly happy with a car that drives at low speeds like a milk float? “I think in his ideal world he hankers after a sports car, really,” says Sandra. “But he’s thrilled with the Prius because he was secretary of state for the environment for a while. He likes the idea that when you are in a town you’re not using petrol.”

Sandra is not quite so thrilled. For a start the car’s bossy, beeping all the time if you forget to put your seatbelt on. “You have to open a gate to go over our cattle grid. I refuse to put it on from the cattle grid to the house and it gets so cross. It gets more hysterical as you go. It’s very new and everything is sort of strange. It’s got a road map that tells you where you’re going, if you want it to.” Does she mean satellite navigation? “Ah, yes.”

It was all much simpler in the 1960s when Sandra Howard was Sandra Paul, girl about town and fashion model. She loved minis, to drive and to wear.

“I took my test the first time when I was about 17. And I think they were very wise to fail me; I didn’t have a clue. I did take an international test. I just had to drive once round Trafalgar Square and I could drive in France.

“I was modelling at the time. I’d been working for The Sunday Times, which had just brought out a colour supplement, as it was called in those days, and I went to do the Paris collection with Terence Donovan [the fashion photographer].”

When she passed her British test Sandra bought her first car, for less than £100. “It was an elderly Mini with sliding windows, dark red, and I called it Rudi — the only car I’ve ever named. It just sort of seemed to suit it. I was 22 (she is now 64).

“All through the Sixties and Seventies you could park in London and I know it as well as a taxi driver. I shot round studios all over London. I knew special garages where they would let you slip in for half an hour.

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