Clarkson--Look Who's Back

by Gwen Russell

  Some people were pretty annoyed, not least Roger Geffen, campaigns manager of the CTC, the national cyclists’ organisation. ‘We were unhappy that he effectively advocated running down cyclists,’ he said. But Roger, at least, unlike so many others that Jeremy has managed to upset down the years, is well aware that much of what Clarkson says is calculated to annoy. ‘You might say, “He’s got his tongue in his cheek so why worry?”’ he said. ‘And fair enough, most people won’t take him seriously. The trouble is that some will.’

  Clarkson himself totally denies this. ‘When people say that to me, I ask, “Would you do something just because I did it?” And they always say no. And I say, “Well, if you wouldn’t, why do you think someone else would?”’

  Indeed, most don’t and that is how he manages to get away with so much. Nor should his wit be underestimated in all this. If Jeremy simply went around making boorish remarks about all and sundry, his appeal would have faded years ago, but he always manages to keep humour to the fore. Had his critics but realised it, almost everything about Jeremy is to do with the humorous impact he creates, quite as much as the sensations he so often manages to cause. If you doubt that, consider the above remark: there is no way anyone would seriously believe that Jeremy would try to run a cyclist down. It is simply that he enunciates such outrageous views.

  On another occasion, he raised eyebrows by announcing that he’d taught all his children to drive in the grounds of the family home, something that might have been considered admirable were it not for the fact that two of them were still under the age of ten. But then again, why not? As long as they were on private land, with a father who is one of the most expert drivers in the country in charge, Jeremy’s actions were entirely responsible – it was simply due to his public persona that he was causing such an intake of breath.

  Indeed, he was being eminently reasonable. ‘They’re all great drivers,’ he said. ‘Emily’s even driven a Porsche; it’s sensible. When they pass their driving tests, they won’t feel the need to go a zillion miles an hour and have all this aggression inside them like all the other teenage monsters on the road.’ There, if you looked behind the public image, spoke a man with whom many agreed – not least because he highlighted the menace of teenage drivers.

  But, of course, worrying about reckless teenage drivers was not entirely in accordance with Jeremy’s blokeish image, and so, moments later, it was business as usual. Take his attitude towards people who tried to maintain safety on the roads. ‘On Top Gear, we refer to the Health and Safety people as the PPD,’ he announced. ‘The programme prevention department.’ Top Gear officials hastily assured everyone that the programme was ‘pure entertainment’, as indeed were the words of its most famous presenter.

  As ever, people were all too willing to rise to the bait. ‘I am sorry Jeremy Clarkson believed that health and safety was the “cancer of a civilised society”,’ said Timothy Walker, director-general of the Health and Safety Executive, in a very restrained reposte. ‘I do not think the families of over 200 people killed at work each year would share his view.’ Of course they wouldn’t, but Jeremy was not aiming his words at them. As usual, he was taking on the received status quo, teasing those in authority like the bumptious little schoolboy he once was, and taunting the responsible people, the adults, if you like, to take him on.

  And Clarkson was well aware that whatever he said was likely to cause trouble. ‘He does know,’ a friend once remarked. ‘He doesn’t care; he doesn’t care what other people think. He is, despite the showbiz connections and the career, an absolutely classic Yorkshireman, like Geoff Boycott or Freddie Trueman. You can take him or leave him and he is not even interested in what your decision might be.’

  And that, of course, was what made him so good at his job. ‘If he’ll make the politically incorrect joke about women or other nations without turning a hair, then we can be fairly sure that motoring industry PRs aren’t going to get any special treatment,’ said one insider.

  Even the mightiest can be laid low, however, and Jeremy was now forced to enter a period of rest. Having discovered osteoarthritis in both hips some months previously, he then suffered two slipped discs in his back. Cheerily assuring his public that he was on steroids and intending to drink for Britain, Jeremy did not let the problem cramp his style. He did, however, have to be chauffeured about by Francie, an irony not lost on those who had observed the views he had sometimes aired about female drivers in the past.

  As for Francie – ‘It’s wear and tear, brought on by years of driving fast cars and flying upside down in aeroplanes,’ she said. There was some amusement from onlookers, however, when the couple were pictured with Jeremy looming over his much shorter wife, who was staggering under a load of luggage. ‘Jeremy strained his back recently and was told by a doctor not to lift anything,’ a Top Gear spokesperson said.

  With rather good timing, Francie decided that what was good for the gander was good for the goose, at least when it came to cars. And so, amid much fanfare, she wrote publicly about a pursuit she’d been taking part in for nearly a decade now: endurance rallying. Indeed, Francie remarked that it was not really to Jeremy’s taste, given how much he relished his creature comforts, but eight years previously she had taken part in the first Guild of Motor Endurance rally from Liège to Agadir and back. This year it was to be Reims to Monte Carlo in a Caterham CSR.

  Then again, no one should have been surprised. The Clarksons were clearly a happy couple at the time, and so it was not unlikely that they should share their interests. On top of that, Francie was Jeremy’s manager, and so would have had to become interested in cars, whether she had been naturally so inclined or not. In the event she didn’t win, but she did approve of the car, offering the verdict, ‘Get one and show your husband you can put your foot down.’

  Jeremy, meanwhile, continued to recover from his years of wear and tear. His critics, however, were in no way mollified by this spate of personal suffering and let him know it in no uncertain way, in fact, in a manner that made headlines across the country. And for once, it was not Clarkson who managed to create the dust-up, but one of the numerous individuals he had managed to offend with his points of view. And, if truth be told, someone should have seen this coming.

  Very controversially, Jeremy was due to receive an honorary degree at Oxford Brookes University for supporting high standards in engineering, mainly on the back of the Brunel programme and his wistful farewell to Concorde. He knew he was a controversial choice and started off his speech with the words, ‘I fully expected to be speaking to you today covered in flour and eggs, like a giant human pancake.’

  Unfortunately, he spoke too soon. A particular welcoming committee lay in wait. Students and academics alike were already unhappy that such a boisterous and non-PC figure was to be honoured, but one group meant business. It comprised a group of environmental protestors, who described Clarkson as ‘a murderer – every time someone drives a car, a little bit of the earth dies’. In the event, their subsequent gesture certainly made waves: dressed in an academic gown to receive the honourary degree, he was hit in the face by a bystander with a cream pie.

  But perhaps this should have been foreseen: no less than 3,000 students at Oxford Brookes had signed a petition protesting at the degree being given out. Nor were students the only objectors, the academics present, or at least a portion of them, seemed equally irate. ‘Clarkson’s public statements could be interpreted to be at odds with many of the university’s values,’ said George Roberts, the university’s director of e-learning. BMW workers were also angry about the award, and Transport 2000 commented that a serious academic institution honouring Clarkson was like Scotland Yard paying tribute to Inspector Clouseau.

  Jeremy, however, did not seem too upset at the turn events had taken and even managed to come across as a good sport. ‘Good shot,’ he announced calmly, wiping pie off his face, before remarking that the concoction was a little too sweet. Even afterwards he remained unperturb
ed. ‘At least they didn’t dig my granny up,’ he said, a reference to animal rights’ campaigners who desecrated the grave of a woman in Staffordshire whose family reared guinea pigs for research. He was soon back on form, though, calling his assailant an ‘angry bird’ and ‘premenstrual’.

  Of course, if you dish it out, you have to be able to take it and Jeremy was proving himself eminently capable of that. No one has come in for the sharp side of his tongue as much as environmentalists – ‘My wife bought me a patio heater for our anniversary and I’ve always been a bit nervous of it,’ he once remarked. ‘Now I know the environment lot hate them so much, I’ll burn them twenty-four hours a day.’ With remarks like that, it was hardly surprising that one of them might finally have a sense of humour failure and suddenly get nasty with a piece of pie. Indeed, in many ways, it’s a wonder this doesn’t happen more often. Clarkson has upset so many people that there are only too many people ready, willing and able to take aim.

  Then there’s everyone else who’s come in for a bit of stick. To think of a category of people is to lay into it, as far as Jeremy is concerned, and that includes just about anything. He is not afraid of retribution and he likes to cause a fuss. ‘The problem with France is that, like Wales, it is a very pretty country spoiled only by the people who live there,’ he once remarked, and when that was followed up by a Welshman asking why he hated Wales, he replied: ‘What with the Germans and Koreans to think about, I honestly haven’t time to be hating the Welsh … it’s Surrey I hate … if Kent is the garden of England, then Surrey is surely the patio. It’s shit.’

  Again, what so many people who get upset by him tend to forget is that Clarkson is doing this deliberately. He is a professional controversialist: people switch on the television or read his columns in newspapers to see him being outrageous; they do not want him to make placatory remarks. And so Clarkson, good Yorkshireman that he is, lays it on the line, insulting one nationality here, a specific individual there, and then sits back and watches the subsequent uproar.

  And it is simply so easy to provoke the environmentalists. ‘Of course, there is no doubt that the world is warming up, but let’s just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be,’ he pronounced. ‘Switzerland loses its skiing resorts? The beach in Miami is washed away? North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane? Anything bothering you yet? It isn’t even worthy of a shrug.’

  And when he is forced to take it on the chin, or, as in the pie incident, full in the face, he does so without complaining. He would be no fun if he whinged about the extremely negative reaction he provokes in some quarters, but he doesn’t. He simply gets on with it and moves on to cause mayhem once more.

  His appeal is very broad, something witnessed by the fact that the two newspapers he has written for since the mid-90s, The Sun and The Sunday Times, are aimed at the opposite ends of the market. His appeal is classless, and his blokey image one that many men – and women – respond to, regardless of their own background. Indeed, people are often surprised to find that Jeremy is himself the product of a private school education – he now has a kind of classlessness that can go down equally well and equally badly on all sides.

  But there’s no question about it: he really does cause upset and the reaction to ‘Piegate’ showed quite how deeply antipathy towards him existed in some quarters. The media were not exactly devastated by the turn of events, and some went on to congratulate the pie thrower, Rebecca Lush. ‘Afterwards, I had an extraordinary response with messages of support, including from several people in the media,’ she said. ‘I met someone who works at News International [which owns The Sun and The Sunday Times, Clarkson’s two papers] who just wouldn’t let go of my hand, and kept on going, “Thank you for doing that! Thank you!”’

  Indeed, she had been rather enthusiastic about the whole episode, recounting breathlessly how she had stalked her prey. Clarkson had gone into a marquee, she said, continuing, ‘But then he came out again, so I ran after him.’ It took quite a leap for the pie to hit its target, given Clarkson’s height, but still she managed it. ‘He’s a bloody huge guy,’ she went on. ‘Hitting him in the face was like playing basketball. I had to run very fast from a security guard. I don’t know what you can be charged with, legally, for putting a pie on someone – and I had no idea what Clarkson might do.’

  It didn’t bother Jeremy one jot and, shortly after this, he was seen mingling with the great and good at Lady Thatcher’s eightieth-birthday celebrations at a lavish party at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London’s Hyde Park. No pies were forthcoming that time.

  Nevertheless, he did reflect on it shortly afterwards, when he made his views public about the event. ‘It’s unfortunate that I was terribly jet lagged,’ he remarked. ‘Otherwise I would have guessed that something was up when the photographers said, “Would you mind stepping over here, because the light is better?” They knew what was going on. And I have to say that, at the PR level, it was a fantastic result to the environmentalists. One-nil to them.’

  Was it one-nil to the Greens? It was hard to say. Clarkson’s reaction, both in his sangfroid and his making light of the incident lost him no fans. Nor was it he who that appeared determined not to listen to both sides. ‘I don’t want to be their bête noir,’ he said of the Green Movement. ‘I want to be the champion of ordinary people – who seem to be lectured to all the time. Look, there are two sides to the argument. I do listen, constantly, to their side of the argument. And every time they’re presented with my side, they shove a pie in my face.

  ‘I went on Jeremy Vine’s radio show to discuss some aspect of the environment and they had the environmentalist George Monbiot on, and he said, on air, that if I liked 4x4s, it must be because my penis is small! He sent me a letter afterwards apologising for getting carried away, but that’s the level of debate. They get together to discuss things, these people, eating their nuclear-free peace nibbles, and they’re just never exposed to the other side of the argument. They say, “We live in Hackney and we think such and such a thing is wrong.” And that’s it. There’s no doubt that we will all have to subscribe to their views eventually. In fact, to judge by the pie incident, the time has already passed.’

  Indeed, Monbiot’s language certainly didn’t help his cause: ‘I suggest that instead of getting into an overpowered 4x4 and ripping up the countryside, he responds to one of those e-mails that offers to enhance the size of his manhood,’ he said.

  It later emerged that Rebecca, the pie-thrower, unsurprisingly, was an activist with the organisation Roadblock, an outfit particularly appalled by Jeremy’s somewhat laissez-faire attitude to environmental concerns. ‘Clarkson used to be a climate-change denier,’ she said, when she explained how she was finally driven to throw that pie. ‘Now that position is not tenable, so he just says, “Who cares?” It’s obnoxious: a selfish and irresponsible attitude and it’s dressed up as laddish humour.’

  Other environmental protestors queued up to agree. ‘Clarkson is a class-A muppet and absolute plonker,’ said Ben Stewart of Greenpeace. ‘One can only assume that his jeans are restricting his blood-flow. He says things about global warming that are wrong. Also he’s said that he has wet dreams about Greenpeace ships turning over. He’s best ignored, but that’s pretty bad.’ The trouble is, though, that everyone he turned on had a difficult time ignoring him. They always wanted to be able to answer back. And Stewart, like Roger Geffen (although the former sounded even more irritated than the latter), was aware that people did listen to what Jeremy had to say.

  As more emerged about Rebecca, it turned out she was as committedly pro-environment as she perceived Clarkson to be anti. She had spent four months in jail in 1993 for her role in protests against a road-building programme on Twyford Down. ‘It wasn’t nice, but the support we got was incredible,’ she said. ‘It was the first time environmental activists had been sent to prison, and it really inspired people. I received 100 letters a day. I love the countryside and I love nature,
but I don’t see global warming as a countryside thing – it’s about the survival of our species; it’s about people. And transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.’

  Then there were various other protests in which she managed to attract a huge amount of attention: she once chained herself to a digger and, on another occasion, managed to disrupt a meeting about the Thames Gateway bridge by snatching the microphone and running around with it and crying, ‘This is a scandal. The bridge is being railroaded through. You are not listening.’ Was this not, along with pie-flinging, a little bit childish, she was asked.

  ‘You grab attention through direct action,’ retorted Rebecca, and she was certainly correct about that aspect of it. ‘I don’t think people would have thought about these issues otherwise. Direct action is about making people think, “Why is that woman doing that?” People thought we were weird, in 1992, to risk our lives by standing in front of bulldozers. But environmentalists are always putting out messages that we’re derided for until, ten to fifteen years later, the ideas have become mainstream.’

  Nor was Clarkson to be her last target: the fuel protestors were next. ‘They are ignorant of basic economics,’ she said. ‘The government has bent over backwards for them since 2000 by not increasing fuel duty at all. They’re in the Dark Ages. They have to face the reality that fuel prices are going up. That’s not a radical statement, it’s what the AA and the RAC are saying.’

  Perhaps, given that his passion and his career are cars, it is inevitable that the environmental lobby causes him particular ire. Clarkson never misses a chance to put the boot in, and always seems totally unconcerned when he’s attacked in return. He will also make wildly sweeping statements when he is on a roll, proclamations that have a lot more to do with irritating the green brigade than actually making a great deal of sense. ‘Engineering is more important than environmentalism, he once declared, adding, ‘Environmentalism has given the world nothing. I do have a disregard for the environment; I think the world can look after itself and we should enjoy it as best we can.’