Jimmy White blames himself for recent car damage

7:30pm Friday 4th July 2008

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Snooker legend Jimmy White's car has been vandalised but he bizarrely claimed the damage was not caused by yobs but by himself.

The 46-year-old Epsom resident made the astonishing claim to our reporter when we informed him of the damage to his Mercedes car earlier this week. As well as a smashed rear window, the top-of-the-range Mercedes had been scratched the whole length of the vehicle.

Speaking just yards from his gated home on Tuesday, Jimmy was surveying the damage as he waited for someone to repair it.

"I did it," he told our reporter. "I did it on Saturday. My driver left his keys and passport inside and we needed to get inside, Autoglass are on the way to fix it. They said I should have smashed through the front windscreen because it's easier to replace."

He added that the scratch to his car, which is often referred to as "keying" when vandals drag a key along a car, was simply wear and tear. "That's the car that we travel in so it does get damaged sometimes. It is nothing to do with the window," he said.

Two years ago the six-times world championship runner-up narrowly cheated death when his Aston Martin DB9 exploded in a fireball.

And in February this year, the divorced dad-of-five called in police after it emerged the brakes and suspension on his £120,000 Bentley had been sabotaged.

But he denied to our reporter that this had been the case and bizarrely shifted the blame to rats.

"We had forensic work done on the brakes and it turns out it was rodents that had cut through the brakes," he said. "They had eaten through the cable which was a relief for us because I was getting a bit worried."