Poppy Skipper had downed two bottles of red wine and several mojito cocktails when she decided she wanted to leave the social gathering at a country house.
Hostess Harriet Heal and fellow guest Isabella Snell thought they had persuaded her to stay over as she was too drunk to drive.
But after they went to bed Skipper got in Miss Snell’s Vauxhall Adam car, seemingly confusing it with her own Vauxhall Astra.
The 29-year-old drove for 10 minutes before she hit a grass verge and overturned Miss Snell’s car outside a pub in Sherborne.
She fled the scene covered in blood from a head wound and was arrested a few hours later at hospital after a police hunt with dogs.
Poppy Skipper (Image: BNPS)
The £6,700 car was written off and a £2,000 designer handbag belonging to Miss Snell was also damaged.
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Police initially thought Miss Snell was the driver injured in the crash, but she was still at the dinner party in Charlton Horethorne. Skipper was arrested at Yeovil Hospital at 3.28am but a blood sample was not taken until 9.25am.
By that point her reading was under the drink-drive limit but experts were able to back-calculate and establish at the time of the accident her blood alcohol level was probably 172mg in 100ml of blood – more than twice the drink drive limit.
Skipper, from Milborne Wick, Somerset, told police she had no memory of anything between leaving the dinner party and being in hospital the next morning.
She pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicle taking and driving while unfit through drink and appeared at Bournemouth Crown Court for sentencing.
Skipper is a professional racehorse trainer and owner and keeps her horse at her grandparents’ 500 acre farm at Charlton Horethorne.
Laura Deuxberry, prosecuting, said by the end of the evening Skipper was “very drunk, unsteady on her feet and slurring her words”.
After a ‘heated discussion’ she was persuaded to not drive home, and her friends thought she had gone to sleep.
However, she mistakenly took Miss Snell’s vehicle and crashed outside the Mermaid pub, 4.3miles from where the car had been parked.
The car overturned and the landlady of the pub found a female covered in blood.
Gemma McKernan, defending, told the court Skipper had no previous convictions and worked “incredibly hard and long hours” with racing horses.
Miss McKernan said: “She was horrified that she had put people at risk that way.”
Recorder Nicholas Haggan sentenced Skinner to a 12-week jail term, suspended for two years and banned from driving for two years.
