Love letters

We call them cherished numbers; the Americans, more honest perhaps, call them vanity numbers. You know: KEV1, 911RON, or the rather impressive plate I saw on a red BMW being driven by a beautiful blonde woman, A1SUC. Badges of ownership; statements of intent; expressions of wealth; testaments to inflated egos.

The height of naffness, some may say. Look at the owners: Paul Daniels has MAG1Cl Jimmy Tarbuck COM1C; Jimmy Savile J1MMY. You get the idea: faded celebs with stockbroker-belt houses, jags in the drive and £20,000-plus to chuck away. It’s enough to give conspicuous consumption a bad name.

Byron Roberts, who runs the sale of “personalised” number plates for the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), hears these arguments every day. He has a stock reply: “It’s fun. It’t not exactly another form of taxation, because the buyer has a choice, but the money does go to the Exchequer.” The DVLA scheme only started in 1989 and, since then, selling personalised plates through auctions and the Select Registrations service has raised £250m.

Roberts’ job is to select unused registrations – the range of letter.number combinations is pretty well infinite, though many of the best have been used up – and to make sure interested buyers know they are available. 1TEE: tell golfers; 5POT: snooker players; POP1: rock stars.

“It’s my job to come up with interesting and quirky numbers,” says Roberts, “and it’s important that each attracts at least two prospective purchasers. We have four or five sales a year. At our first sale at Christie’s. there was a definite air of affluence – Rolls-Royces arriving from every direction. Since then it’s been mainly dealers and the nouveaux riches.”

For the non-nouveaux riches, there’s the option of using te Select Registrations service when you purchase a new car. Explaining this properly would take several thousand words, but the essence of the system is that for £399 – more if you want the magic 1 or something ultra-groovy – you can choose your own new-registration plate.

My initials are SRM, so, for £399, I could have R2SRM, R66SRM, R100SRM. R1SRM would be £999, though 1-plates might also be offered for auction if they are especially desirable, and some plates are offered at prices between £399 and £999 if they have special appeal. Got that? No, I thought not. Anyway, you can reserve your R-plates from today.

Enough of the theory. It was time to test the market. I went to the DVLA Classic Collection at Ascot – a two-day auction of 750 previously unreleased plates. I planned to be a fly on the wall – an idea that had already occurred to a German camera crew, who were making a programme demonstrating the eccentricity of the British. Evidently cherished number plates have no role in the land of vorsprung durch technik.

The audience fell into distinct categories. Men with large stomachs who I took to be dealers. Middle-aged men with glamorous wives looking for that special present: 1LUV, M1PAT, KEL1Y. Young men with girlfriends and mobile phones – some dealers, others looking for a plate for their BMW. Bill Gates lookalikes with mobile phones but no girlfriends – evidently they were in love with their cars. Young Asian men – cherished plates, signifiers of success, have a big following in the Asian community. The Antiques Roadshow crows, who get a kick our of auctions. And autonumerologists, obsessives for whom plates are both hobby and passion, the people who gave up trainspotting because they couldn’t bear the excitement.

Bidding was brisk. A team of five auctioneers, all men, conducetd the event and prices were typically in the £2,500-£4,000 bracket. The high spots were RAP1D – sold to the neatly dressed man with tyhe TVR for £22,000; R1DER (a great plate, I thought), which went for £13,5000; ELV11S, bought for £11,400, but surely you would always wish you had ELV1S (bought in 1990 for £60,000); and 1USA, sold for the relatively modest price of £13,900, the anticipated bid from the US embassy failing to materialise.

The people who had come for a particular plate – their initials, their spouse’s name – bid recklessly, flamboyantly; dealers cannily, with nods and winks. There were some fierce battles, one for R1KKY, which went for £10,200, another for 1NDB (£12,100) – two Norman Dudley Braithwaites were obviously at war.

I quickly decided I was an expert and was desperate to bid: only the fact that my credit card had been impounded saved the Guardian from a hefty expenses bill. 123UFO went for the absurdly low price of £2,000; 6TEE was a steal at £2,800; MAD1X a giveaway at £3,500; and my favourite, 1OTT, went for just £5,000.

I’d hoped 1PVC would go to a dominatrix, but it was snapped up by three middle-aged men from a car cleaning company who clapped and embraced each other when the hammer fell. The manager of a rock band bought POP1S for £2,500; a tanned woman showjumper bought R1DES for £7,000, having dropped out of the bidding for R1DER at £12,000; and the goalkeeper Dave Beasant bought BES1M for the knockdown price of £1,000. The sale realised more than £3m.

If you can’t afford to buy at an auction or through Select Registrations, don’t despair: David Parker recently came up with a novel solution. The proud owner of a Talbot Samba, he decided to change his name to match his number plate. Step forward Mr C539FUG, we salute you.

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