If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Why don’t they try, just once in a while, to make us happy rather than guilty? And at this point we get back to where I began, on Tuesday evening, at the first church service I have ever enjoyed.

  It was full, as is usual, of lots of middle-aged and elderly people in suits. And naturally, there were a few bored-looking children with side partings and school coats, wondering why they couldn’t have been left at home to play Grand Theft Auto.

  However, up at the front, where you would normally expect to find an old man in a frock, there was a gospel choir. Which was made up of what I can only describe as several sets of lungs with hair. God, they were loud.

  Of course, because the audience was white and middle class and middle-aged, we had no idea what to do. I guess many of us had seen a gospel choir in a film and I don’t doubt that, like me, we had all thought, ‘How quaint.’ But here we were, face to face, and we had no idea what to do.

  They were giving it the full Aretha Franklin and we wanted to bop along, but we were in a church so, obviously, that wasn’t allowed. Except it was, because after the first song one of the singers turned round and, in so many words, said, ‘Come on, everyone. Why don’t you get off your bony white arses and join in?’

  So we did. We belted out ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ and ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ and, yes, at one point I was even up to eleven while singing something by Boney M. By the time we got to the encore, which was ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, we were louder than AC/DC.

  Gospel has its roots in Africa, where song is based on a system of call and response. The singers give you a line, and then you repeat it. Which is ideal if you can’t afford a hymn book or you can’t read. And because they could afford no instruments, they used the human voice for the music, and clapping for the rhythm section.

  As you would imagine, it was decried, when it first surfaced in America, for destroying the dignity of songs that were written to serve God. I think that’s rubbish. I think songs are often enhanced with some gospel-inspired backing vocals. Blur. Madonna. U2. They would agree with that.

  But you judge for yourself. Next Christmas, if you feel obliged to worship the baby Jesus in some way, don’t bother with Rick the Vic and his wonky organ. Say no to the uncomfortable pews and the old ladies in hats and try a bit of happy-clappy gospel.

  I would go even further. The Church of England is in dire trouble. Visitor numbers are falling. Congregations are dying, literally. And there seems no hope. But there is. Simply make the next Archbishop of Canterbury black and let him fill his churches every Sunday with some Boney M and Johnny Mathis. It’ll be standing room only.

  27 December 2015

  Pipe down, mudslingers. It was Frank, not Phil, that soaked the north

  As the north of England gradually sank beneath the swirling brown torrent, we learned that Sir Philip Dilley, the boss of the Environment Agency, and therefore the man responsible for the nation’s flood defences, was sunning himself in Barbados.

  Naturally, we were invited to sneer at this ne’er-do-well who takes our money to do a job and then buggers off to the Caribbean whenever the weather turns iffy.

  But hang on a minute: let’s just say for the moment that Sir Dilley had cancelled his winter-holiday plans. Let’s say that, instead of heading for Gatwick to board a plane to Barbados, he’d got on a train and headed instead for Carlisle. What difference would that have made?

  The rain would still have fallen. The rivers would still have burst their banks. A thousand DFS sofas would still have been ruined. And Robert Hall would still have been on the news every night, in his logo-less wellies, telling us about northern grit.

  When it became obvious that a street was in danger of being submerged, did the shopkeepers stand quivering in their store rooms saying, ‘We have no idea what to do. If only the boss of the Environment Agency was here to offer some kind of guidance’?

  When that bus became trapped in the torrent, did the fire brigade rush about in panicky circles, waving their arms in the air, saying, ‘Everyone onboard will surely die because Sir Dilley is not here to tell us how to inflate our dinghies’?

  Actually, I should imagine that the people on the ground were quite grateful that he was in Barbados, because if he’d turned up in his gabardine, and his new Christmas jumper, they’d have had to stop rescuing people and make him a cup of tea.

  We saw this with David Cameron. He was in flood-hit towns, shaking hands with various flood-relief workers, who, because they were shaking hands with the prime minister, were not doing any actual flood-relief work.

  It’s therefore better that politicians and civil servants stay away whenever the weather girds its loins. Their job is to sit down after the flood waters have gone away and the DFS sofas have been replaced to work out how best such problems can be prevented in future.

  For evidence of this you need look no further than the Lake District when the first storm came roiling in from the west. I can’t remember its name. Eunice, probably. Or Brian. Whatever, a local engineering company immediately dispatched its men and its heavy equipment to solve the problem, which they did in short order.

  A couple of days later the town was threatened once more, but this time the boss of the local engineering company was told by police chiefs obsessed with health and safety that it was too dangerous for his men to work. So, because these police chiefs were on the ground, and not on holiday in Barbados, thousands of people spent their Christmas scraping raw sewage from their plug sockets and cooking their turkeys with a candle.

  Exactly the same thing happened again this week when Storm Frank came barrelling over the Pennines. Homeowners were told to stop protecting their property with sandbags and leave the area immediately. The chief constables were running around as if a giant meteorite was on its way. ‘There is a danger to life,’ they shrieked.

  This is the first thing Sir Dilley should do. Tomorrow morning he should hold a meeting in his office with various people from the police and the Met Office. And he should tell them in a special stern voice that in future they’ve got to calm down and stop pretending that above-average rainfall is an extinction-level event.

  Afterwards he should ask local councils if they’d offer grants to any homeowner who’s put decking over their back garden and turned their front lawn into a car park if they’d put it all back as it was, to give the rainwater a chance to soak away before it gets to the greengrocer’s.

  Sadly, though, Sir Dilley will not be able to take any of these practical steps because on Monday he will almost certainly be in a headhunter’s office, having lost what the Daily Mail calls his ‘£100,000-a-year, three-day-a-week cushy number at the Environment Agency’.

  This, I think, is actually the biggest problem facing Britain today. Whenever a problem arises, the boss is invariably blamed and then sacked before he has a chance to make sure it doesn’t arise again.

  It’s all rooted in a disease that causes rational people to hate anyone who is moderately successful or lucky or beautiful. We’re invited to rejoice if we see a spot of cellulite on Kate Moss’s thighs. We are encouraged to laugh openly if a lottery winner loses his fortune in some way. And we are invited to sneer if a politician has the temerity to go on a foreign holiday.

  You may be aware of the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’ feed. It’s a place where children of the well-off post photographs of themselves drinking champagne and wearing watches the size of a medium-sized tortoise. If I were a teenager and I looked at all those pictures, I’d be inspired to get a good job and work hard. But no. Instead of thinking, ‘One day I shall be able to provide all that,’ the disease makes us think, ‘Right. What can I do to make sure they lose their watches and their champagne?’

  In short: money, if you’ve earned it, is bad enough; but money, if you haven’t, is unforgiveable.

  All of which means that just a day after Sir Dilley got back from his holiday in Barbados, he was described on his Wikipedia page as an ‘upper-class twerp’.

  He c
ertainly isn’t a twerp, because he gained a first-class honours degree in civil engineering. And I’m not sure about the upper-class bit either, because his only political contribution has been £2,000. To the Scottish Labour Party.

  All I do know is that we pay him to do a job. And now we must leave him alone so that he can get on and do it.

  3 January 2016

  Kim has a bomb. No need for panic – just fire up the Roman candles

  It was a tremendous week for the glorious leader of the Workers’ Revolution Party, who, using cunning and guile, stunned the world by taking three days to reorganize his Cabinet.

  Meanwhile, in North Korea, another glorious leader of another Workers’ Revolution Party went one stage further and, in a deep pit near the Chinese border, set off a hydrogen bomb.

  Or did he? North Korea’s Fiona Bruce, who delivers her news bulletins by shouting while wearing a nylon baby-doll ballgown, certainly seemed to think so. She said the country had successfully detonated an H-bomb, and then, after a short commercial break in which stirring music was shown over a fetching picture of Kim Jong-Corbyn, she announced that America was an imperialist dog. Only less delicious.

  Naturally, all the Western leaders were very cross about this new development. ‘We are very cross about this,’ said Philip Hammond, Britain’s Foreign Secretary. Chinese leaders were cross too, because the blast had caused cracks to appear in a school playground on their side of the border.

  And that, really, is when the penny started to drop. ‘Hang on,’ thought the world’s experts. ‘If this really was a hydrogen bomb, then surely it would have caused more damage than cracks in a school playground.’ ‘Yes,’ said the world’s seismologists. ‘It caused only a very small shudder. Our needles would have rocked more if a fatty such as Kim Jong-un had fallen down the stairs.’

  At this stage it’s important to understand the difference between a simple atomic bomb – the sort that was dropped on Japan towards the end of the Second World War – and the much more fearsome hydrogen bomb, which uses a normal atomic explosion to trigger a far larger, thermonuclear reaction.

  Russia has set off a thermonuclear bomb with the explosive force of 50 million tons of TNT. Detonate one of those a thousand feet above London and the windows in Cairo would rattle. Whereas North Korea’s bomb only managed to crack a school playground a hundred miles or so away. Boffins are saying it was a device of about six kilotons, which in the West is known as a ‘firework’.

  As a tool for scaring its enemies into acquiescence, then, Fatty-un’s bomb is about as effective as a pair of slippers. But then along came a former British ambassador to North Korea, who told the Daily Mail that this was just the start. He said that if the bomb could be made to work, and that if it could be militarized so that it would fit into a missile, and that if that missile could be loaded into a submarine, then Jong-un’s glorious navy could sail undetected through the Solent and, with no warning at all, damage school playgrounds all the way from Ringwood to Buckler’s Hard.

  That sounds very terrifying, but there are a lot of ‘if’s, chief among which is this submarine business. We were told last year that North Korea had indeed launched a non-nuclear test missile from a sub, but it later emerged that actually it had been from a submerged barge.

  The North Korean navy appears to be not very good. It runs two fleets, one on the west coast and one on the east. This is because the vessels it has are not capable of getting from one side of the country to the other. When it stages manoeuvres, one or two ships usually sink.

  Some, however, sink on purpose. These are submarines. Mostly they are tiny little things that have been abandoned by most navies for being completely useless. But there is talk that North Korea has built itself a much bigger vessel based on a 1960s Yugoslavian design.

  Hmmm. I once flew across Cuba in a 1950s Russian aircraft that had spent most of its life in the Angolan air force, and that was pretty ropy.

  But a Yugoslavian-designed submarine that was built in North Korea. It’s hard to think of anything less likely to work. Especially after the chef has loaded up the larder with several dozen excitable spaniels.

  Let’s say, however, that it does. And let’s say that they manage to fit it with a tube from which this thermonuclear missile can be fired. Does anyone seriously think it’ll be able to sail all the way from the Sea of Japan to the Solent without being detected?

  It runs on diesel power, which means it has to stay on the surface most of the time. And what are people on cruise liners and cargo ships going to say when it burps and belches its way past them? ‘Ooh, look, a big dead whale with a weird metal erection.’

  This is what the world always seems to forget when it comes to nuclear weapons. You may be able to build one, but then you have the problem of getting it to explode over the city of your choice.

  During a recent bout of tension between India and Pakistan, I asked an Indian chap if his country’s nuclear missiles would be capable of hitting Islamabad. ‘I’m not even sure they could hit Pakistan,’ he replied.

  We saw only recently four Russian cruise missiles sailing over their targets in Syria and landing hundreds of miles away in Iran. And somehow we are expected to believe that North Korea is on the verge of developing a missile that can be fired from underwater and will then guide itself to Wilton Avenue in Southampton.

  Well, I don’t, which is why I sniggered when Philip Hammond responded to Fatty-un’s underground firework explosion by saying he would be pushing for a robust response.

  What form will that take? A strongly worded letter? Or is he saying we should order one of our subs to wipe Pyongyang off the map? I suppose we can take comfort from this: at least we have a choice. If Comrade Corbyn ever gets into the hot seat and Trident is abandoned, we won’t.

  10 January 2016

  I stand before the Twitter Inquisition, guilty of not worshipping Bowie

  As you may have heard, David Bowie is dead. And all week we’ve been told very forcefully that he was an inspiration, a genius and a force for good in a troubled world. Flowers were laid outside his New York home. There were outpourings of grief all over the world. And the television schedules were cleared to make way for hastily prepared look-back documentaries. David Cameron didn’t actually interrupt Parliament to say Bowie was ‘the people’s pop star’, but I bet it crossed his mind.

  The next day every newspaper carried page after page of thousand-word think pieces from anyone who had access to a computer. ‘I once stood next to him at a urinal and remember well how thoroughly he washed his hands afterwards.’ ‘I saw him driving a car once and it struck me then how down to earth he was.’

  I was caught up in the mood of the moment and opened Twitter to say something respectful and emotive. But here’s the thing. I was too consumed by sadness about the death of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart to think of anything sensible.

  It’s not that I didn’t like Bowie. I did. ‘Modern Love’ is the only song that can get me on a dancefloor. I chose ‘Heroes’ as one of my Desert Island Discs. And Hunky Dory is one of only two albums yet recorded on which I like every single track. The other is Who’s Next, in case you’re interested.

  But of course you’re not interested because, even now, a week after Bowie’s death, I bet you’re still running around with a lightning bolt on your face, playing ‘Ashes to Ashes’ over and over and weeping as you plan your candlelit vigil outside his dad’s former home in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire.

  Furthermore, I bet you’re still reeling from my claim that I’m more shocked and saddened about the death of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart. I am, though. Ed Stewart was the sound of my childhood. I once asked him to play ‘Clair’ by Gilbert O’Sullivan for my sister on his Junior Choice show and he declined. Even then he could see that a song about a fully grown man’s love for a small girl was somehow wrong.

  Sadly, though, I am unable to wax lyrical at any length about dead Ed because that will be seen as disrespectful to Bowie. And this is my b
ig problem.

  My colleague Camilla Long fell into a similar trap. As people headed off last week to Brixton, Bowie’s south London birthplace, with hopeless little tea lights and Spiders from Mars scarves, she spoke out on Twitter about the need to ‘man up’, commenting that all the grief was ‘deeply insincere’, and was widely condemned.

  At dinner on Monday I said I’d been more upset when Clarence Clemons from the E Street Band died, and immediately there was a stunned silence. Even if I’d vomited in their food, the other guests couldn’t have been more horrified. ‘You can’t say that,’ said one young woman after she’d been brought round with an adrenaline shot to her heart.

  But I can say that. And I did. Because who says we must all have a hive mentality? The problem is widespread now. If you were to go on to Twitter or FaceCloud or whatever and say that you didn’t give a stuff about Syria’s refugees, you would be torn limb from limb. The queen bee has decided that we little worker bees will be sympathetic to their plight, and that’s that. We are.

  It’s the same story with David Cameron. No one is allowed to say out loud that they like him. In the same way as no one is allowed to say they don’t like Judi Dench.

  Cycling is a good thing. And all cyclists are saints. Someone decided that this is so, and somehow it has now become the law. And anyone who dares to flout that law will find himself in the court of YouTube, where he will be sentenced to spend the rest of his life as a quivering hermit.

  There used to be something called political correctness, which was an invisible force field around race, gender and sexual orientation. In many ways it wasn’t a bad thing. But now its tentacles have become endless and have spread into pretty much every aspect of our lives.

  Being fat? That’s not allowed. And neither is being thin. Being rich is evil. Being poor is noble. Being rich and giving your money away to the poor is Bono-ish and therefore to be sneered at. Suggesting quietly that paedophiles have an illness and should be treated for it rather than set on fire is idiotic. Being a paedophile is the worst thing in the world.