If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  That still leaves us with the badger, though. This is the real menace. When he’s not marauding about the place, knocking over walls and killing cows with his arsenal of vindictive diseases, he likes to eat as many hedgehogs as possible.

  One of the main prerequisites, in fact, for turning your village into a hedgehog-friendly zone like Burton Fleming is that the area is not infested with an army of Brian May’s flea-ridden mates.

  Which brings me neatly back to Prince Philip. When he stops walking around with his hands behind his back later this year, he could very easily keep his mind fresh and his body active by joining a hedgehog reintroduction scheme near one of his castles.

  Obviously, I can’t see him drilling holes in a fence or erecting a small ladder. Nor can I see him running a bring-and-buy stall in Sandringham’s village hall. However, I can see him doing his bit by pouring himself a nice glass of red and sitting at his bedroom window with a brace of Purdeys, waiting for a badger to heave into view.

  7 May 2017

  If Farron really wants votes, he must deal with our most grievous malaise: culottes

  So if Labour wins the general election, Jeremy Corbyn will reintroduce the Deltic railway locomotive, put Mungo Jerry back in the charts and make rich people in the south buy everyone in the north of England a brazier so they can be warm when they are picketing someone else’s place of work.

  Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat, who is called Timmy, says that if he wins a Commons majority he will lower the voting age to six and take us out of Europe by not taking us out at all.

  This has annoyed the Green Party, which thought of these things first, so it’s gone further by saying that, if it wins 325 more seats than it got last time around, it will increase the number of bottle banks, issue free tampons to the poor and make prostitutes cheaper.

  That leaves us with the strong and stable Conservative Party, which may look as though it’s being run by the steering committee from Carshalton golf club but says that, despite appearances, it will provide strong and stable leadership to create a strong and stable country where the strong are stable and the stable are strong.

  Don’t you find all this a bit depressing? I mean, here they all are, all these parties, with the chance to say and promise whatever they like. And all they can come up with is more bottle banks and something about British Rail. Seriously. Is that the limit of their imagination?

  What we want is someone with vision. Someone who really does want to make life better for as many people as possible. Someone who understands that the most important thing facing the nation right now is not the NHS or Brexit but the average-speed camera.

  That’s what we want to hear from a party. ‘If we are elected, we will immediately remove all speed cameras. And restrict bicycles to children’s playgrounds, which is where they belong. Oh, and women will no longer be allowed to wear culottes.’ That would get our attention.

  And how quickly would you vote for someone who said they’d introduce profiling at airport security so that people who are very obviously not terrorists – because, for example, they are very obviously Andrew Lloyd Webber – would be allowed to board the aircraft without being irradiated and sexually molested first?

  If you are standing for election, you have a clean piece of paper. You can fling whatever you like into the mix and see if it sticks. So why not say you will introduce the death penalty for people who drop litter?

  Maybe people would be appalled by that, in which case you’d lose. But maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d like to see the carcass of a fly-tipper hanging upside down from a lamppost. I know I would.

  I think it’d also be a good idea to imprison anyone who’s called The Jeremy Vine Show, or written something on the Mail Online’s message boards. And while we are on the subject of prison, why not say that inmates will be locked up in an unheated cell and will only be able to survive if they become adept at sucking moisture from the moss on the walls?

  I’m on a roll now. So how about preventing newsreaders from saying, ‘The following report contains flash photography’? We know already. And freeing advertisers from the need to employ a shorthand speaker who has to read out the terms and conditions and caveats and complex financial implications extremely quickly at the end of every radio commercial?

  Gillette would be forced to stop selling razors in packaging so robust you need dynamite to get through it; newspapers (this bit may be edited out) would not be allowed to put supplements in polythene bags; and foreign aid and intelligence-sharing would be denied to any country that refused to adopt the British plug.

  At the moment you have the Labour Party saying it’d spend an extra £37 billion on the NHS and the Tories thumbing their noses a day later and saying they’d spend £38 billion. And we all roll our eyes, because we know this sort of stuff is important, like getting your tax return done on time and flossing regularly, but what really bothers you is that your wi-fi router keeps breaking down. That’s what you really want the government to do. Something about that.

  You have Corbyn dribbling on about how he’ll introduce forty-two more bank holidays and Theresa May saying she’ll stop foreigners joining her golf club, and then you have Question Time, where all these things are discussed as though they are gravely important. Which they’re not. Not when your husband has died and his bank account’s been frozen and you don’t know what probate means and you have to get a bus that’s full of diseases to go to Citizens Advice, which is shut because the staff are on a two-day ‘equality in the workplace’ course in Harpenden.

  So you have to go back at the end of the week and you’re cross that you’ve been made to wait so you shout at the young woman behind the counter and she calls the security guard because abuse of staff is not tolerated, so you’re back on the bus, which now smells of sick, and you still don’t know what probate means and what you’re supposed to do with the endless forms that keep slithering through your letterbox.

  A person such as this is going to vote for any party that says it will encourage customers to abuse counter staff. Especially if it goes on to say that all workplace courses will be banned.

  21 May 2017

  Um … let me break the ice, Mrs May. Have you ever been to a lap-dancing club?

  As you may know, Donald Trump has been on a tour of various places the folks back home have heard of: Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican and, of course, Sicily, which was made famous by The Godfather.

  Naturally, his progress has been mocked mercilessly by most intelligent people. Many thought he would get Palestine muddled up with Palmyra and that in Rome he’d have referred to the Pope as Mr Hanks. But I reckoned he’d do OK because these meetings, really, are just a chance for two people to do small talk – and Americans are good at that. They speak to one another at the urinals. They’re open and interested.

  Mr Trump will have breezed into the Saudi royal palace and said, ‘Hey, Mr King. Nice hat.’ And they’ll have talked about hats for a while, and how much gold leaf you can get away with on a chair, and then they’ll have called in the photographers and signed the arms deal and promised to stay in touch.

  Look at it this way: after you’ve shared a lift with an American, he will get out and say, ‘Good to know you.’ Whereas we’ll say, ‘Good to meet you.’ Because we understand that, after a minute or two in someone’s company, we don’t know them. Knowing someone, if you’re British, takes years.

  I was speaking about this with Richard Hammond the other day. He is famously useless at passing the time with a stranger, so I said, ‘You just have to be interested in other people.’ To which he replied, ‘But that’s it, you see – I’m not.’ This is why, if you meet Hammond, he will just stand there looking at you.

  My problem is subtly different. I never know when to switch from small talk to something more meaty. Knowing when to change from the weather to body fluids is second nature for an American, but for me it’s like knowing when to move in for the first kiss. And I’m completely useless at tha
t as well.

  Once, I dropped a girl back at her flat just as Hazel O’Connor’s ‘Will You?’ came on the radio. She reclined her seat and said, ‘Oh, I love this song’ and yet I continued to sit there, talking about how warm it was for the time of year, until the song finished and she said a rather puzzled goodnight.

  This is why I’m hopeless at drinks parties. I recently made the mistake of sitting down and talking to a stranger, which meant I was stuck. I couldn’t get up and walk off, and neither could they. We didn’t know each other well enough to talk about genital warts or politics or anything like that, so we just went round and round the politeness bush.

  I once met Nelson Mandela and, for two days, I sweated buckets about what I’d say to break the ice. Being British, I have only two fallback positions – school fees and property prices – and neither seemed appropriate. So in a panic I opened with, ‘So, Mr Mandela. Have you ever been to a lap-dancing club?’

  This meant I spent the next hour sweating and stuttering through the wreckage of our meeting, knowing that I’d committed a social faux pas and that, if I’d been there to sign an arms deal, it would have fallen through. Yet the truth is that ‘Have you ever been to a lap-dancing club?’ is a bloody good opener. It bypasses the need for small talk completely. Which has to be a good idea.

  A couple of weeks ago we needed to hire a pretty young woman for the film we were making. And because we were in Croatia, it didn’t take long to find one. She arrived, as Hammond and I were waiting for the clouds to be the right shape, and didn’t bother with an introduction or any of that unnecessary nonsense. She simply squatted down and said, ‘When I got the text asking me to do this, I was at doctor’s with a pipe up – how you say – my back ass.’

  There was a pause, which Hammond broke by saying, ‘I got nothing.’ And the truth is, I had nothing either. I was in a state of shock. But pretty soon we were talking about polyps and colon cancer and why the French insist on ingesting everything medicinal up their anuses, and this was far better than sitting there talking about property prices and school fees and how nippy it was for early May.

  Actually, Hammond did bring the conversation on to the unseasonable coldness, but she was having none of it. ‘I know,’ she said, flattening her T-shirt over her breasts. ‘Look.’

  This Eastern European directness probably explains why Croatia’s roads are in such an impeccable state of repair. Their guy simply turns up at the EU and says, ‘Give us some money immediately because we want to make our infrastructure better,’ and walks out five minutes later with a cheque.

  Whereas the Britisher arrives and spends an hour talking about the speed of the train he’s used, and the weather, and how Marlborough is probably better than Heathfield because property prices are lower in Wiltshire, and soon he’s forgotten what he went there for. That’s why Croatia is on the up and up and we are heading for the 1950s. Because we’re imprisoned by our own good manners.

  They cause problems in other ways too. Because if you spend an hour swapping conversational amuse-bouches with someone, you never really work out whether you like them or not. Which means ending up with an address book full of charlatans and bores.

  And that brings me on to a clever test dreamed up by a friend. She makes a point, whenever she’s introduced to a new person, of using the C-word straightaway. If they shy away like a frightened horse, she knows they will have nothing in common and moves on.

  It’s a better filter than sniffing one another’s bottoms for half an hour and learning nothing more than what the weather is like on their side of town.

  28 May 2017

  Honestly, ladies, I do sympathize with you about the menopause – men get it too

  It’s fairly safe to say that most men don’t really understand anything about the menopause. Except that we can’t make jokes about it. It’s profound and important and life-changing. It causes hot women to become hot in other ways. It makes them behave strangely. In parts of Europe it causes brain surgeons and rocket scientists to come home from work one day and decide to spend the rest of their lives in shapeless black dresses, cleaning the front step with an old scrubbing brush and sobbing.

  Here bright, clever women who’ve been in love with their husband for twenty years suddenly decide they’d like to stab him in the back with a pair of scissors. And then go shoplifting. Many become obsessed for no obvious reason with keeping fit, and some discreet research last week revealed that more than you might think try their hand at a spot of afternoon lesbianism.

  Men recognize these symptoms because when we say to our wives, ‘Why are you trying to strangle me with a flex?’ they use a very loud voice to reply, ‘Because I’m going through the menopause, you hopeless bastard.’

  What causes these behavioural abnormalities isn’t clear, because it’s only spoken about behind conspiratorial hands, in whispers, and never when there’s a man round the table. As a result, we only know that something is going on in the ovaries, or is it the womb? Whatever, we know it’s called ‘the change’ for a reason. Even if we are a bit blurry about what’s changing. What we do know, as I said at the outset, is that we have to sympathize or die.

  I’ve always been good at that. When I was a reporter on a local newspaper I’d often spend mornings in the magistrates’ court where a succession of weeping middle-aged women of previously good character were wheeled out to be fined £10 for helping themselves to a bar of soap at the chemist’s. It was then my job to put their name in the newspaper. Which naturally was a punishment a thousand times worse than the fine.

  The trouble is that sometimes I’d pop to the lavatory and miss a case. Which meant that ten women would be publicly humiliated and one, because of my bladder, got off with a light raid on the contents of her purse. I reckoned this was unfair and raised it with my editor. ‘Either we cover them all, or we stop covering them altogether.’ This resulted in me being switched to cover parish council meetings.

  A few months later the wonderful Lady Isobel Barnett, a regular contestant on What’s My Line? and a woman I admired greatly, appeared in the newspapers having been convicted of stealing items worth 87p from her grocer. Just four days later, she electrocuted herself in the bath.

  Everyone was saddened by that because we all knew that she was menopausal at the time of the crime. And we all thought she should have been treated with more dignity and kindness.

  Which brings me on to the male equivalent of the menopause. It’s called the midlife crisis and for some reason anyone who goes through it is always labelled as pathetic. And you can put your eyebrows down now, please, because I’m being serious.

  When a man who has spent twenty years being the perfect husband and father suddenly gets a tattoo and a Harley-Davidson he is mocked and ostracized by his friends and family. How is that fair? We don’t mock women of fifty for losing their decent waist, so why can they mock men for suddenly deciding after years of sedentary box-set living to get one?

  A man doesn’t decide when he gets to sixty that he wants to spend the next few years on the pull. It’s not rational. It’s not sensible. He doesn’t want a pair of tight white trousers; they’re uncomfortable. And he doesn’t want a motorcycle either, because he thinks they’re silly and dangerous. And yet, led by a peculiar drive from deep within his underpants, he suddenly decides to buy both things. And for some reason we find this tragic.

  A boss who’s spent all his working life treating his secretaries with good manners and kindness is suddenly consumed with a need to take one to a Premier Inn one Thursday afternoon for a spot of rumpy-pumpy. He’s read books. He’s travelled. He’s run a business. He’s wise. And yet now he’s become stupid. That cannot be something coming from the head. It must be biological.

  Cod psychology tells us that he’s spent all his life being a lion and that soon he will be no good at it. His teeth will fall out, his testes will turn into sultanas and he will be left to ruminate on what could have been. If only he’d got the Harley and the tight
y-whitey jeans.

  There was a picture of Sean Connery last week, and it was a shock. Last time we saw him, in The Rock, he was old, for sure, but there aren’t many women who would have kicked him out of bed. Now, though, he looks decrepit. And we know there must have been a moment when the lights went out. We all know that moment is coming and we want to cram our lives with as much as possible before it goes all dark and doddery.

  That sounds like a reasonable thesis, but my point is that it doesn’t happen consciously. Any more than Lady Isobel was acting consciously when she half-inched that can of tuna and tub of cream.

  We must accept that the menopause and the midlife crisis are the same thing. And that they will come to us all in varying degrees at some point. And then, when we’ve accepted that, we must look at the middle-aged mad people who are campaigning for our votes in the coming election and think: ‘Really? Wouldn’t we be better off with someone who’s thirty?’ Anyway, the point is that we respect the menopause.

  4 June 2017

  BA lands in the brown stuff over a power cut. Next we’ll blame it for turbulence

  And in other news last week, a group of jumper enthusiasts called Skytrax left their Thermos flasks and B&Q folding chairs at the end of the runway at Heathrow and announced through their swollen adenoids they’re thinking of taking away British Airways’ coveted four-star status.

  If the binocular boys from the plane-spotting community go ahead with their threat, BA will be ranked in the tables alongside the national carriers of Burma, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan.

  Apparently, this has something to do with the fact that the seats in economy are now suitable only for the sort of people you see in an L. S. Lowry painting, and the food served back there would be rejected by most dogs. Well, I can’t comment on that because I haven’t turned right on a plane for years.

  I suspect mostly, though, the main reason BA is facing a downgrade to junk status is that at the start of the half-term break it suffered a global computer crash that caused its fleet to become stuck in a giant game of Musical Statues. Many people’s holidays were ruined, thousands of business meetings had to be cancelled and there was chaos. I saw it first hand. Angry-looking Heathrow security people were barring the doors, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who were being inconvenienced. And then more wailing and gnashing when I was waved through after flashing my BA gold card.