Madonna's £2,500 parking fines

It has become one of Madonna's best-rehearsed routines.

She rolls up in a chauffeur-driven car and disappears into a London gym for one of her twice-weekly sessions with a fitness specialist.

And then, while her driver waits on a yellow line, along comes a traffic warden to sign a parking ticket and slap it on the windscreen.

Astonishingly this has happened more than 50 times, incurring a minimum total of £2,500 in fines. But Madonna, who is worth an estimated £235million, obviously feels it is a price worth paying. Wardens first noticed one of her cars - which alternate between a BMW 7-series, Audi A8 and Mercedes Maybach - waiting on the single yellow line in August last year.

That was when the 47-year-old first started visiting the basement studio run by fitness guru James D'Silva, to be strapped to a wooden apparatus nicknamed 'the rack' which is believed to create a leaner figure.

While she was fighting the flab, her driver soon found himself waging war with the wardens.

To avoid trouble, the star tried riding her mountain bike on the two-mile trip from her home to the gym, followed by two minders also on bikes. But after her recent fall from a horse, in which she suffered several fractures, it was back to the car.

The driver has tried reasoning with the wardens and keeping the vehicle constantly moving backwards and forwards. Still the tickets keep coming.

'We have watched the wardens do it week in week out,' said a neighbour. 'They wait in a park round the corner and suddenly appear. Madonna's driver has started getting really irate. He says to them, "You know I can't move, you know what I'm here for, so if you're going to ticket me just get on with it and get out of here".'

The standard fine for a vehicle parked illegally on a single yellow in central London is £100. If that is paid in 14 days, the fine is reduced to £50. After 28 days, a more costly enforcement process begins. A spokesman for Westminster City Council said: 'If our attendants are aware that a certain person is parking illegally regularly, they will be targeted. Whether that person is you, or I, or Madonna, they will get fined.

'By keeping the car moving, the driver is skating on very thin ice. The warden could easily argue that although he is moving, he is actually occupying the same space over a period of time.'