If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  All rape is exactly the same. Anyone who drives an expensive car is fundamentally bad. McDonald’s is wrong. Starbucks is the devil. Taylor Swift isn’t. Global warming is definitely caused by man. Sean Penn is a hero. Donald Trump’s a moron. All nurses are angels, all hospital managers are bunglers, supermarkets are money-grabbing bastards and the EU is a complete waste of everyone’s afternoon.

  These are all rules. You may not disagree with any of them. If you do, within earshot of someone else, you will be beaten with sticks.

  Much the same fate now awaits anyone who says, ‘I mourn David Bowie’s passing but I didn’t like some of his music and I thought that most of his outfits were pretentious twaddle. And, while I’m at it, what was Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence all about?’

  Try saying that in public and pretty soon you’ll learn what it’s like to drown in spittle.

  The fact is, though, David Bowie wasn’t in the prime of his life, speeding through a tunnel, and neither was he in an open-top Lincoln on a sunny drive through Dallas: he’d run his body ragged with a rock’n’roll lifestyle, and he died from cancer, aged sixty-nine, which until quite recently would have been considered a ripe old age.

  It’s sad that he’s died, but please don’t demand that I wander about in public shedding tears that aren’t real.

  17 January 2016

  Transgender issues are driving me nuts. I need surgery on my tick boxes

  Now that women can vote and homosexual couples can marry, you might imagine that the world’s student activists, trade union leaders and environmentalists would pat themselves on the back and break open a bottle of sustainable elderflower juice to congratulate themselves on a job well done.

  But no. They have decided that we must now all turn our attention to the plight of people who want to change their name from Stan to Loretta, and fight for the right for men to have babies.

  I’ll be honest. When this issue first began to surface a couple of years ago and we had pop stars such as Sir John running about, talking endlessly about the transgender cause, I did roll my eyes a bit. Because in the immortal words of Reg, from the People’s Front of Judea, ‘Where’s the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?’

  As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok. They were called ladyboys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag-night anecdote.

  I wasn’t alone either. Only recently I was chatting to a doctor about how people can now demand gender-reassignment surgery on the NHS and he said, ‘I get lots of people in my surgery with a Napoleon complex. But I don’t buy them a pointy hat and a French army uniform.’ I found that funny.

  But there’s a distinctly unfunny side to the coin. Just recently some friends of friends were having one of their eight-year-old daughter’s school chums round for a sleepover. As the day approached they received a call from the girl’s parents, who said, ‘Er, she’s not actually a girl.’

  She had been born a boy but had insisted from the age of three that she had a girl’s name and wore girls’ clothes and, later, that she went to a girls’ school. And her parents had simply indulged this whim.

  I was horrified. I wanted to seek them out and explain that they were free to live a lunatic life, washing their armpits with charcoal and liking Jeremy Corbyn’s thoughts on how ballistic nuclear submarines must be built by the comrades and then used as flower pots. But they must not, and I was going to emphasize this with spittle, be allowed to poison the mind of a child.

  When I was five I wanted to be Alan Whicker, but my parents didn’t buy me a blazer and send me to hospital to have my adenoids sewn up. Other kids wanted to be super army soldiers or astronauts. It’s what kids do: dream impossible dreams.

  You don’t actually take them seriously. You don’t take them to a hospital when they’re ten and say, ‘He wants to be a girl, so can you lop his todger off?’ Because what’s going to happen five years later when he’s decided that being a man isn’t so bad after all and he’s in the showers at the rugby club?

  And there’s more. Only last week we received news from the Daily Mail that at Isle of Wight prison nine inmates have decided they would like to be women and now want the NHS to stump up £100,000 for the necessary procedures.

  Transgender enthusiasts talked with serious faces about how this demonstrated the scale of the problem and the horror of being a woman trapped not just inside a man’s body but inside a man’s prison as well.

  Yes, but hang on just a cotton-picking minute. When I was at school, I announced that I would like to be confirmed as a Christian. This was seen by teachers and my housemaster as a sign that I was growing up, so they happily agreed to my request.

  And from that day on I was allowed to skip compulsory chapel on a Sunday morning – where you were checked and ticked off on a register – and go instead to the early-morning village communion service, where you weren’t. Which meant I didn’t have to go to church at all and could therefore spend all weekend with my girlfriend.

  Can’t anyone see, I wailed, that this is what’s going on in the Isle of Wight nick? They tell the screws they want to be women, they get a bit of make-up and some breasts to play with and they are then transferred to a women’s prison, where they can spend the rest of their lives being a lesbian. It’s every man’s dream.

  To try to calm down a bit, I turned to the BBC for guidance, and there I was told there are 650,000 people living in Britain today with some kind of gender ‘issue’. Well, I just sat there shaking my head, because the simple fact is: there aren’t.

  We are told that one in ten of the population is gay, that one in ten has cancer, that one in ten supports ISIS, that one in ten thinks Corbyn’s doing a good job, that one in ten has a criminal record, that one in ten is living below the poverty line and that one in ten was born elsewhere, and now we are expected to believe that one in a hundred are transgender. Well, if that’s so, it means that – according to my maths – fewer than three in ten are healthy, straight, honest, British people who don’t want their genitals altered. And that’s obviously rubbish.

  But then I thought of something. Let’s just say for a moment that one in a thousand are transgender. Or one in a hundred thousand. Or even that it’s actually just one. Let’s say that there is one person out there who is a woman living in a man’s body, or the other way around.

  I started to imagine what life might be like for the poor soul. It would be dreadful. Absolutely awful. And all they seem to want to make their life better is a third gender-option box on official documents. That’s not really the end of the world for everyone else, is it?

  24 January 2016

  Utter even a kind word and the lefties’ digital vitriol is instantly fizzing

  Ever since the tie was invented, gentlemen of means have sent their sons away to a good boarding school where they would forge lifelong friendships with like-minded boys who’d go on to become useful-to-know captains of industry and world leaders. It was called ‘the old boys’ network’.

  It didn’t really work for me, if I’m honest. I don’t see my school’s magazine very often but the last time I looked, there was a letter from one of my former classmates saying he’d become a manager at United Biscuits. Another had written to say he’s now a policeman.

  However, the friends I met at school did introduce me to other friends, and now I have an address book that’s full of people who have jets, and can get tickets to things, and generally make my life that little bit easier.

  The old boys’ network, however, is rather more than the professional equivalent of Disney’s queue-jumper pass, because it meets in dusty clubs and it sorts out all kinds of political and strategic stuff that makes it easier for the privileged to keep on being privileged.

  Those on the left have never had that luxury. Largely, they went to local state schools, where they met local people who could only dream of moving to Tamworth and
becoming the manager of a biscuit company. They knew that out there, in the world, there were other people who shared their views, but as they never went on shooting weekends, they could never actually find them.

  And when they tried to get organized and national, and came up with secondary picketing, along came Mrs Thatcher, who said, ‘Not on your nelly, comrade.’ And banned it.

  But then, all of a sudden, there was Twitter. And because of it, the lefties had a means of communication. Of finding one another. They had a network to rival the clubs of St James’s and the picnics at Eton.

  Today, Twitter is said to be in trouble and lots of people have come up with all sorts of reasons why rival social media sites such as Snapchat, which is where young men post pictures of their poos, and Instagram, where young women post pictures of their dogs, are powering ahead.

  I used to like Twitter a lot. It was a fun place where clever people such as Giles Coren could condense their thoughts into a literary amuse-bouche. But now it’s being policed by people who are furious about everything and everyone who isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. As a result, it can often be very unpleasant.

  Last week, in this column, I said that in the olden days I used to find the whole transgender issue either funny or annoying. But I concluded by saying that it must be awful to be trapped inside the wrong sort of body and that if these unfortunate souls want a third gender-option box to tick on a passport application form, no one should really mind.

  And with wearisome predictability the Mirror completely ignored the conclusion and ran a story saying that I was a bigot who’d filled my newspaper column with transphobic invective. It uploaded this to the internet and that was that.

  As is the way with modern media, the story spread rapidly, until by lunchtime Twitter had accepted it as fact and then carpet-bombed my phone with abuse. It was weird. I’d said very clearly that I sympathize with transgender people. I’d said they could have my support in their quest to be recognized as a third gender. And yet, despite this, I was drowning in their vitriol.

  I’m not alone, of course. There was that woman who sent a tweet saying she was boarding a plane to Africa and that she wouldn’t get AIDS while there because she was white. By the time she landed, Twitter had got her sacked.

  Only last week Twitter noticed that the Christian names of Wayne Rooney’s three children began with the letter K. This meant he was definitely a member of the Ku Klux Klan and as a result he must be taken out and shot as soon as possible.

  I’ll give you a dare. Go on to Twitter now and say something mildly right-wing. Say there are too many immigrants in Britain or that patio heaters didn’t cause those sperm whales to beach themselves in Norfolk. Or that you’ve shot a badger. By teatime you’ll have been made to feel like Hitler and it’ll feel like the whole country wants you to commit suicide.

  Of course, you can block users who are abusive, but that’s like standing in a Bangladeshi sewer after Ramadan finishes. You can flail about as much as you like and wail loudly about the importance of free speech. But ultimately, you’re going to get covered in excrement.

  This is Twitter’s big problem. It’s being policed by the Stasi. And of course, when they react angrily to what you’ve said, the Mirror and the BBC and the Guardian see this as evidence that you’ve done something wrong. So they run a story saying, ‘Twitter has reacted with fury …’ which then causes the whole site to become angrier still. Really, they should drop that bird logo and replace it with an endlessly spinning red flag.

  This, then, is not the sort of platform where advertising can thrive. Praise a restaurant or a shop, and there will be an immediate assumption that you’ve been paid off, using money that should have gone to a refugee, you bastard.

  In this anti-capitalist world of Twitter’s secret police, any attempt to market a good or service is met with derision. Sponsorship? Don’t make me laugh. It would have been easier to get Leonid Brezhnev to wear a McDonald’s badge on his hat. And as a result, trying to monetize Twitter is like trying to monetize Arthur Scargill’s hair. It’s not possible.

  I think it’s a shame. Twitter’s a good idea. But these days it sounds like a sixth-form common room after the headmaster has announced the guest speaker at tomorrow’s assembly will be Katie Hopkins.

  31 January 2016

  Yo, kids, this morning’s anti-drug message is brought to you by ISIS

  In the beginning there was the war on drugs, and then after that hadn’t been won, there was the war on terror, which isn’t going terribly well either. And now everything has become very complicated because it seems the terror and the drugs have joined forces.

  Reports suggest that ISIS is feeding its foot soldiers with an amphetamine called Captagon, and there’s evidence to back this up. Last November Turkish anti-narcotics police confiscated a staggering 11 million pills that they say were on their way into Syria.

  Apparently, if you take Captagon you feel invincible and wide awake and strong. And the effects are even more pronounced if you don’t drink, which we must presume applies to the ISIS mob. In fact, you feel so awake and so invincible that you will happily strap some dynamite to your chest and then blow it up.

  Well, now, I’m sorry, but how do the ISIS top brass make this sound attractive to their men? ‘Come on, comrades. Take one of these pills and within the hour you will be human wallpaper.’ If I were sitting there cross-legged on the floor, I’d put my hand up and say, ‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather not.’

  I see this problem with all drugs, in fact. Because who looks at someone who has ingested cocaine and thinks, ‘Yes. I’d like to be boring and self-obsessed, so I will have some of that’? And who looks at people who’ve smoked weed and thinks, ‘Yes. I want to find toothpaste funny and I want to be so hungry that I’ll eat a sherry trifle sprinkled with frozen peas, so pass it over’?

  On a recent trip to Burma I was taken to a party in a remote mountain village where everyone had taken something called yaba. Roughly translated, this means ‘madness drug’. It is made from a mixture of caffeine and methamphetamine and was originally given to horses that were pulling heavy carts.

  But then one day someone thought, ‘I know. I’m going to put one of those horse pills in my mouth. And then I’m going to swallow it to see what happens.’ What happened is that he turned, immediately, into a swivel-eyed lunatic. He became a rampaging bundle of taut sinew and spittle, massively angry about absolutely everything and extremely violent.

  If you see someone who you think has taken yaba, here’s a tip. Don’t spill his pint. Especially if you are in Burma’s Shan state, because here he will be furious – and armed with an AK-47.

  Now, you would have thought that if you’d been in a bar, watching someone banging their head on the wall and shooting anyone who looked at him funnily, you’d think, ‘Crikey. I must remember not to take what he’s had.’ But no. They didn’t. For some reason they thought it would be fun to shoot their mother for putting too much milk on their cereal and tucked in.

  I’ve never tried a Quaalude, but those I know who have done talk about it as though it’s some kind of perfect nirvana. They go all dewy-eyed and misty about ’Ludes in the way that you and I go all dewy-eyed and misty when we recall childhood picnics and first kisses.

  And I struggle to see why, because I’ve now seen The Wolf of Wall Street, and Leonardo DiCaprio made it very clear that actually Quaaludes cause you to crash your Lamborghini and roll around on the floor with what appears to be cerebral palsy. This looked a pretty good anti-drug message to me.

  However, anti-drug people think they know better and are forever showing us pictures of dead drug runners in Colombia and comatose teenagers who’ve eaten some dodgy ecstasy at a nightclub in Preston. Obviously, this isn’t working. Then you had Nancy Reagan with her famous ‘Just say no’ campaign, and that didn’t work either, because what teenager would take a lecture from a woman who looked as if two crows had crashed into her face?

  The most
recent anti-drug push in America was even more hopeless. It used emojis, which, Grandad, are those little pictures you put at the end of a mobile-phone message if you want your text to be billed as a picture and you don’t care because your parents are picking up the tab.

  To you and me the anti-drug message just looked like gibberish. There were pictures that included a ‘donut’, a bee and a man putting something in a wastepaper basket, and none of it made any sense. But to a teenager the message was very clear. And what it said was: ‘I do not have to be trashed to have fun.’

  Amazingly, earnest charity people thought kids would see this and think, ‘Ah. Whoever wrote that and put it on a billboard in Times Square understands my language, so next Saturday night, instead of smoking a joint with my friends, I shall go to the library and read some Hugh Walpole.’

  There was another emoji ad that – if you were under thirty – said, ‘I’m tired of drinking to fit in.’ I’d love to see them run that in Newcastle.

  Except I wouldn’t, because it would be pointless and stupid. As pointless and stupid as showing kids how they will look if a drug takes hold of their life.

  Because teenagers don’t think much past tomorrow afternoon, which means they simply cannot see the possibility that one day they’ll be turning tricks in a back street for a rock of crack.

  ‘It won’t happen to me’ is what kept everyone sane in the trenches. And it’s what keeps the lavatories packed at most nightclubs.

  Far better, surely, to show them the Quaalude scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. To show them what drugs do in the here and now, not in twenty years’ time and not to some lowlife in a cartel on the other side of the world.

  And I can think of no better place to start than Captagon. ‘Take this and you’ll be overcome by a need to go to a shopping centre and explode.’