If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  And the Kurds. And the mysteries of Islam. And the sense among Muslim youths that America is somehow out to nail anyone with a tea towel on his head. Yes. We must forget all that and assume that all was well in the region until 2007, when the summer was a bit warmer than usual.

  This, according to Charles and Charlotte, meant the crops failed, and that meant people who lived off the land were forced into the towns and cities, where for reasons that are a bit unclear, if I’m honest, they decided life would be better if they threw a homosexual off a tall tower and set fire to their next-door neighbour.

  And that in turn led to Turkey’s Roy Lichtenstein shouting, ‘Fox three,’ and pressing the Fire control that unleashed his Amraam into the back bottom of the poor comrade’s Su-24.

  If you squint a bit and don’t think too hard, you can just about see that this makes sense. But what exactly are we supposed to do about it? Sell our patio heaters and Range Rover thingies in the hope the world cools down and the ISIS fighters put away their AKs and go back to a life of goats? I’m not sure that’s realistic.

  Or are we supposed to draw a lesson from what’s happened in Syria and resolve to peg climate change where it is? Because if things stay as they are, the farmers of, say, Devon will never be compelled to come to London one day to set fire to Graham Norton.

  Nor would the good people of Cardiff wake one morning to find the streets have been taken over by a load of disgruntled sheep farmers who’ve been driven from the high ground and are now embarking on a life of bank robbery and global terrorism.

  This is what Charles and Charlotte seem to be saying: that when simple country people have a bad year on the farm, they are filled with an overwhelming desire to explode in a Belgian shopping centre.

  Well, if that’s the case, Charles must stand up in Paris and tell the delegates that, if we want to prevent another country from falling into the clutches of a lunatic mob, scientists must be allowed to develop genetically modified food that can grow to be strong and delicious with very little water.

  After the audience has taken this in and the applause has died down, he must adopt a serious face, look straight into the camera and tell Greenpeace activists to stop rolling around on these crops every time they are tested and, to hammer his point home, he should then hold aloft a genetically modified salmon that in one of the farms throughout Panama and Canada became fully grown and ready for the pot in half the normal time.

  Then he needs to eat it, possibly with a bit of hydroponic lettuce drizzled with some biotech corn oil. Afterwards, he should grin and rub his tummy and say: ‘Yum, yum.’

  He needs to say that last year in the United States 94 per cent of all soya beans, 96 per cent of all cotton and 93 per cent of all corn was genetically modified in some way. And then, to show he cares, he must make a plea for this incredible engineering to make its way to the poorer parts of the world as soon as possible.

  Because who’s going to buy a manky Syrian goat when for half the price they can buy a tasty in vitro burger that – and I’m not making this up – was never part of an animal? It’s made from meat that was grown in a Petri dish, in a lab.

  Charles needs to be spooning the stuff down like a five-year-old at a jelly party as he tells the audience how meat made by Brains out of Thunderbirds rather than by Farmer Giles requires almost no land, how there’s none of the methane you get from cows and how it would end the debate on factory farming. He needs to sell this stuff as though his life depended on it. Which, if you share his views, it does.

  In short, Charles and Charlotte need to stop telling us about all the problems we’re creating. And start promoting, enthusiastically, all the solutions.

  Of course, he will say it’s absurd to suggest global terrorism can be ended by science meat and a genetically altered bee. But he was the one who started it by saying the attacks in Paris were caused by my patio heater.

  29 November 2015

  Officer, arrest that man – he’s all too easily offended by Fury’s piffle

  A friend was burgled last weekend. And stand by for a shock because by Wednesday a suspect had been arrested and was in a cell. I thought that sort of thing didn’t happen any more. I thought the police no longer even investigated burglaries because they were far too busy interviewing people who’d said something that someone else thought was horrid.

  We learned recently that a boxing champion of some sort called Tyson Fury had said in an interview that the devil will come to the Earth and do what devils do just as soon as abortion, homosexuality and paedophilia are all legalized.

  The thrust of his argument was that in the 1950s nobody would ever have believed that one day it’d be legal to do sex with someone of the same genital grouping. In the same way as, now, we cannot believe that kiddie-fiddling could one day be considered acceptable. But that maybe … who knows?

  As a result, many people vowed to not buy Mr Fury’s calendar this Christmas. Others went further and tried asking the BBC to make sure he was not shortlisted for a gong at the annual Sports Personality of the Year bash.

  That’s an absurd idea because all Fury has done is tell the world that he’s a bit dim. And if the BBC were forced to shortlist only those with a reasonably high IQ, the Sports Personality of the Year could be a held in a shed.

  One person, however, decided that trying to get a dim man banned from appearing in the same room as lots of other dim men and women was nowhere near harsh enough. He reckoned that Mr Fury needed bringing down a peg or two so he reported him to the police, who confirmed last week that the boxing and Jesus enthusiast will now be questioned.

  Yup. A chap whose job is to beat other men to a pulp is going to be questioned by officers because officially one man – one – was upset by something he’d said. Whatever happened to sticks and stones?

  I’ve been in Mr Fury’s shoes. A number of years ago I said while appearing on Have I Got News for You that I run over foxes for fun and the next thing I knew two burly policemenists were sitting in my conservatory, drinking a half of pale ale and scratching their heads.

  Someone had complained to the Met and the Met had asked the CNPD (Chipping Norton Police Department) to dispatch Starsky and Hutch to my house for a bit of a shakedown. They’d arrived in a bit of a fluster because they weren’t quite sure what was going on.

  Were they there to see if I really had said I’d run over a fox for fun, which we all agreed was a bit pointless because anyone could clearly have heard and seen me saying it on television? Or were they there to see if I actually had run over a fox for fun?

  If I hadn’t, then is it a crime to say that I had? And if I had, is that a crime at all? We weren’t sure. Certainly, we all agreed that it would be jolly difficult in a court to prove that the fox-flattening incident was for fun or because the stupid thing was crossing the road without looking. In the end, we filled in lots of forms that were sent back to the Met in London and then … nothing happened.

  I can pretty much guarantee that this is what’s going to happen with Mr Fury. Two policemen will arrive at his caravan. They will ask him if he really did suggest that homosexuals are the same as paedophiles and then, after establishing that he did, or didn’t, they’ll fill in a load of paperwork, get his autograph and a couple of selfies and that will be the end of that.

  We need to be clear on something here. There is a very big difference between an angry mob in Ku Klux Klan headdresses chanting and parading outside the house of a homosexual couple and a God-bothering sportsman tarring gays and paedophiles with the same brush.

  Let’s be frank. He wasn’t urging gangs of young men to grab a selection of shovels and pickaxe handles and maraud around Soho looking for Julian Clary.

  He wasn’t suggesting that homosexuals should be castrated or put into a camp of some sort. He was simply saying that, as a Christian, he found the notion of legalized gay sex repellent.

  You may not agree with that. I know I don’t. But it is Mr Fury’s right as a citizen of this cou
ntry to express his views. And it is your right to stick your fingers in your ears and go, ‘La-la-la-la-la-la-la,’ if you don’t want to hear them.

  It is also your right to telephone the police and make a formal complaint. And then it’s their duty to send two constables round to see what’s what. And that’s the problem. Because Mr Fury plainly wasn’t inciting any form of hatred. I’ve listened to the tape, and all he was doing was spouting a load of religious gobbledegook. Go down to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning and you’ll hear far worse.

  Plainly, then, something needs to be done, but what? We need a law that prevents so-called hate preachers from urging extremely impressionable young men to explode in a shopping centre. But that law cannot be used to stop Jimmy Carr telling jokes about rape. Or Mr Fury being anti-gay, or me saying I ran over a fox for fun.

  Happily, I’ve come up with a plan. It’s very simple. If, after questioning Mr Fury, no action is taken, the police should then go round to the house of the man who made the complaint and arrest him for wasting police time. And to help them out with that, his name is Ian Sawyer. He’s fifty-five. He’s from Manchester. And he looks a bit like a potato.

  This is the only way to make the professionally offended think twice before picking up the phone. They have to understand that, if they make a complaint and they’re wrong, they are going to get punished for being a crybaby.

  13 December 2015

  The signs said New York but it looked just like London and felt like hell

  At this time of year many people decide that they should go on a Christmas-shopping trip to New York. And, having given the matter some serious thought in the past couple of minutes, I’m fairly sure it’s the stupidest idea in all of Christendom.

  Unless you are one of those pouting imbeciles with expensive hair whose sole ambition is to appear in the Mail Online’s sidebar of shame, Christmas shopping is not even on nodding terms with the concept of fun. It’s too hot because you are wearing a big coat. And because you are wearing a big coat, you knock a lot of stuff off shelves. And then you end up with too many bags and the handles are digging into your fingers so you think you have gangrene, and your car’s parked miles away and it’s raining and the pavements are full of people moving at one mile an hour and you are racked with guilt because you have bought your daughter’s boyfriend some corn-on-the-cob forks and he’s going to know they cost only £2.99 and your daughter’s going to know it too and then she isn’t going to speak to you until Easter Monday.

  So why, when you know it’s going to be like this, would you choose to do it in New York, where the people move even more slowly and the shops are even hotter and you can’t work out what anything costs and you can’t have a cigarette anywhere and, on top of all that, you’ve got jet lag and you want to go to bed, even though it’s only four in the afternoon?

  There’s another problem with New York. You get to the airport in London, you let someone take a photograph of your breasts, you get undressed and they take away your Nivea in case you decide on the flight to moisturize the pilot to death, and then finally you are allowed into the perfume shop that stands between you and your gate.

  And by the time you’ve done all this, you could have completed all your Christmas shopping in your local town, gone home, wrapped everything and watched half of Pointless.

  Instead, however, you are facing a seven-hour flight, seven hours in a queue for immigration and a seven-hour taxi ride to the wrong address in the wrong part of the wrong borough because the driver couldn’t understand a word of what you were saying and had arrived in America on the flight before yours.

  Eventually, though, you will find yourself in Manhattan, rumbling ‘through the concrete canyons to the midtown lights, where the latest neon promises are burning bright’. I think that’s from a song. But no matter, because shortly afterwards you’ll emerge, blinking, into the brawl that is Fifth Avenue, where you will find that all the shops are familiar. That’s because you passed every single one of them on the long and dreary trudge from security to the gate at Heathrow. You also passed them the last time you went to the Village at Westfield. And when you were on holiday in Marbella.

  It doesn’t matter, though. There are so many people on Fifth Avenue doing their Christmas shopping that you have about as much of a say in where you go as a Pooh stick. Which means that pretty soon you’ll find yourself pinned against some kind of diddy skating rink, much like the one at Somerset House in London.

  You hope that you’ll see a fully grown man fall over, but none does, and then you are jettisoned from the eddy and, if you’re lucky, you’ll end up at your hotel, which almost certainly will be owned by a British company and staffed by British people.

  The next day you’ll head into SoHo, where you will be carried past shops such as Jo Malone, Stella McCartney, Ben Sherman, Barbour and Dr Martens, until you end up in Greenwich Village at Myers of Keswick. Or the Spotted Pig. Or maybe back where you started, at Soho House. (Branches in Shoreditch, Notting Hill, Chiswick and Chipping Norton are also available.)

  I noticed this phenomenon the first time I went to New York. Adrian Gill took me to see the ‘real’ America. Which involved staying at a British-owned hotel, taking tea with Robbie Williams and meeting lots of people I dimly remembered from drinks parties in South Kensington.

  I went there again last weekend and the London connection was even more pronounced. In two days I went to the opening of Lloyd Webber’s new show, School of Rock, and then to a party where I bumped into the chief executive of The New York Times, who’s called Mark Thompson and used to run the BBC, and Shaun Woodward, who was an MP for various parties until recently. Oh, and the jewellery designer Theo Fennell. Desperate to hear an American accent, I went back to my hotel, where sitting at the bar was the former BBC presenter Richard Bacon.

  I do not know of two cities anywhere in the world which are as similar as New York and London. Moscow, Sydney, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, Rome – they’re all different. But New York and London? No. One’s a bit taller than the other and one is wider. But that’s it.

  Both have pronounced and quite small districts that come with different smells and a different vibe. Both hum with pent-up energy. Both – these days, at least – have taxi drivers who are useless. Both are filled with people from everywhere else. Both are financial hubs and shopping centres. And both are located on islands off the coast of America.

  Choosing to do your Christmas shopping in New York, then, is like driving hundreds of miles this morning to buy your copy of The Sunday Times. What’s the point when the one available right on your doorstep is exactly the same?

  Well, not exactly. New York may be full to overflowing with British people and British shops and British businesses and British hotels, but when you ask for a cup of tea, the staff are still baffled by the recipe. Which means that after an hour or so you’ll get a cupful of lukewarm water with a small bag of what appears to be bark.

  20 December 2015

  Hallelujah, Reverend! This hymn hater has seen the happy-clappy light

  I woke last Tuesday with a heavy heart because I had to spend the morning lying on my back with a man in my mouth, and the evening in a church, listening to Hector the Rector prattling on about the virgin birth, like it really happened.

  I would love to tell you that the dentist wasn’t as bad as I had feared. But I can’t. Because it was. But the church service was a revelation. It was fantastic. I actually sang, loudly and lustily, and I clapped, and when it was over I was sad because I wanted more.

  School for me was ruined by two things: Shakespeare and God. Mostly God, because on a Sunday morning I would have to get up at crikey o’clock and put on a suit and a tie so that I could spend an hour worshipping someone who never wore much more than a loincloth.

  I hated the hymns very much, apart from ‘Jerusalem’, which isn’t a hymn at all, but what I hated most of all was the seriousness of it all. We were all gathered together to talk and sing
about a fairy tale but anyone caught laughing, or smoking, or having a good time in any way was given a detention. Which meant sitting in a room the following weekend reading more bloody Shakespeare.

  I vowed when I left school that I would never set foot in a church ever again. But of course, things didn’t work out that way because there would be weddings and christenings and now, I’m sad to say, funerals. Not that you can tell any of these things apart.

  They’re all just as miserable as one another. Because you’re in a suit and you have to mumble while someone mangles his way through the hymns on the organ, and then an old man gets into the pulpit and gives you a Form IVB interpretation of some tiny passage from the Bible, during which you are invited not to find any joy at all.

  I went recently to a Catholic memorial and oh my bloody God. On and on went the priest, about the lamb of God and how we were all basically evil and only for about four seconds were we allowed to celebrate the life of the poor man whom God had killed, because let’s not forget that, alongside all the bright and beautiful things he created, he also invented cancer and mites that eat children’s eyes.

  At this point, I should say that I have no problem with those who choose to believe or even those who put a hat on and waddle down to their local church on a Sunday to do a bit of mumbling. They are old and they are clinging to the prospect that when this life is over, there will be another, in heaven. There’s no harm in that. Mostly.

  But I do have a problem with the way the established churches are run in this country. There’s too much lecturing and too many giant thermometers in the graveyard urging us to help God’s accountants pay for a new roof. Why does it never occur to them to get Michael McIntyre or John Bishop into the pulpit to give their spin on how the meek will inherit the Earth?