Tulisa Contostavlos, the former N-Dubz singer and X Factor judge, has been released on bail, having reportedly been arrested on suspicion of drink driving late last week.

Driving a Ferrari, the singer – whose mother Anne Byrne was a well-known ballad singer from Dublin – was said to have collided with a Saab outside a Tube station in North London. Police were called to the scene. Reports in the UK media suggest that the singer and TV star may subsequently have failed a breathalyser test.

Tulisa, who has had previous run-ins with the law, was held for a period of nearly 22 hours in a North London police station, before being released on bail.

"Police were called,” a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police told the Daily Mail, "shortly before midnight on Thursday to outside Southgate Underground Station, following reports of two cars in collision.

"Officers and London Fire Brigade attended. There were no reported injuries. One of the drivers, a 27-year-old woman, was arrested on suspicion of drink-driving and taken to an East London police station. A breath test was administered. We do not discuss the results."

Tulisa, who is 27 years of age, had previously been charged with the supply of Class A drugs, following a so called tabloid 'sting'. However the trial collapsed. The judge threw the case out of court, telling the jury that he believed that a prosecution witness had lied.

Her reputation as a so called ‘chav’ notwithstanding, Tulisa, comes across as a relatively likeable, working class character. She confessed in a BBC Three documentary, that she that she had taken a potentially lethal concoction of painkillers and alcohol, as a result of depression after her entrapment by the paper.

The tabloid sting was a particularly nasty operation, with a reporter posing as a film producer, who fed the lie to Tulisa that she was in the running for a £3.5m film role, which would see her starring alongside Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio.

More recently, Tulisa was found guilty and fined for assaulting the celebrity blogger Vas J. Morgan, at the V Festival in Essex, in 2014. In 2012, her autobiography Honest: My Story So Far was published.