The unfortunate incident occurred last month when the top Cabinet minister Heidi Alexander was driving her Mini Cooper on the B4437 outside Burford in Oxfordshire last month
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander’s car had to be towed away after hitting a pothole “crater worthy of the moon”.
The unfortunate incident occurred last month when the top Cabinet minister was driving her Mini Cooper on the B4437 outside Burford in Oxfordshire last month as she travelled back to her Swindon South constituency from a Labour fundraising event.
Pictures show her green car being loaded on to an AA recovery truck after the incident.
Speaking to the Sun, she said: “I joked to my husband that I thought that the astronauts on Artemis II might have seen a similar-size crater when they were slingshotting around the Moon last week.”
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Ms Alexander said that the ordeal had been an “added expense and inconvenience”, adding: “I think that’s the experience of far too many people in the country at the moment.” Oxfordshire has been allocated £34 million to tackle potholes this year.
It was estimated last month that the cost of bringing pothole-plagued local roads in England and Wales up to scratch had risen to a record £18.6 billion.
English councils risk losing up to a third of their funding to fix potholes if they fail to demonstrate they are working effectively, the Department for Transport announced this week.
Some £525 million of the £1.6 billion funding for local roads maintenance in the 2026/27 financial year will be held back unless authorities prove they are spending the money appropriately.
It comes after Ms Alexander vowed earlier this year to “end the pothole plague and fix Britain’s roads for good”. In an article for LBC, she said: “You’re driving to work and you hit that same pothole, day after day. Our broken roads are a daily misery for drivers and cyclists who face the inevitable choice of either damaging their car or dangerously swerving.
“Potholes also risk unexpected costs, resulting in vehicle repair bills that can be as much as £1,000 – a headache that all of us could do without, especially when times are tough.I share the frustration of motorists around the country. For too long our roads have been symbol of decline – that ends now.”