Jeremy Clarkson: A man never too far away from a controversy

The presenter and columnist has faced a backlash over comments regarding Meghan Markle – and it is nowhere near the first time he has been involved in such a storm, writes Sean O’Grady

Ipso received more than 20,000 complaints over Jeremy Clarkson’s article in ‘The Sun’ (PA)

If Jeremy Clarkson were a car he’d be like one of those really, really big ungainly in-yer-face SUVs with curves in all the wrong places, sporting a ridiculously big, gas-guzzling engine, despised by environmentalists, and with a sexist bumper sticker with a reference to your mum that’s so distractingly awful that it’d be an offence under the Highway Code, never mind the Ipso code. Or as Clarkson might say in that arch way of his: would he be?

You see, the thing about Clarkson is that you can’t be really sure if he means it. That’s not to absolve him. If you think hurtful, wicked things about, say, Meghan Markle and put them in The Sun, but you don’t actually believe a word of it does that make it somehow OK, or excusable? Compared, that is, to if she really did make his teeth grind so much he couldn’t sleep and he actually would hurl excrement at the Duchess of Sussex for some inchoate reason (and he hasn’t ever met her as far as we know). Does it matter any less, in other words, if he does and says outrageous things just for the money?

I ask because people I’ve known, well had the acquaintance of, in the once-fashionable Chipping Norton set, maintain that Clarkson indeed doesn’t believe a word of what he churns out. That he likely does it for the money, the profile and a bit of devilment. I’m told Jeremy is a surprisingly civilised supper companion, not exactly “woke”, but certainly not the literate yob he affects to be.

Indeed, he recently suggested he’d vote Labour “tomorrow” if there was an election, caveating only that “Keir Starmer has made a few mistakes and I don’t like his hair”. His defiant politically incorrect use of tobacco is also a thing of the past. For so long a militant smoker of Marlboro cigarettes, he appears to have given up. You can put two fingers up to the nanny state, but not to your lungs. He gave up just because he has scared by a bit of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Call yourself a man, Clarkson?

It’s hard to tell, really, what goes on inside that tousled head of his. The track record of offensiveness is certainly long and disgraceful, though. It’s difficult to believe that someone could be that publicly puerile for as long as Clarkson has been. He is 62 now, owns a farm, famously, and a big mansion, a place on the Isle of Man, plus a fleet of cars (of course) and is worth about £70m. But he has much the same attitudes and opinions as he had when he was in his twenties, living in a flat in Balham and reviewing fancy cars that he could never afford to buy. As a matter of fact and fairness, when he was contributing to the likes of Performance Car he was an extremely entertaining writer; it’s his later work, especially on TV and Top Gear onwards, that somehow degenerated into cliche and grotesquerie.

In the spirit of a prosecuting counsel presenting evidence, I offer you some snippets, albeit from some years ago, that illustrate the point. In the 1990s, for example, Clarkson really did declare on Top Gear that the Ford Probe “looked good enough to snap knicker elastic at 50 paces”. (If you know your cars you’ll know this hasn’t aged well. In fact, if you don’t know anything about cars you’ll also know this hasn’t aged well).

In the same vein, Clarkson crafted this analogy about the classic 1963 Corvette Stingray, which wasn’t the best-handling of sports coupes, but undeniably looked stunning: “Let’s be honest. We’ve all been out with girls who perhaps have a horrid laugh and questionable table manners. But you’ll still take them to bed if they have the body of an angel.” This, by the way, from someone that the late, great critic Victor Lewis-Smith described as “a man with the self-awareness of Alan Partridge and the physique of an endomorphic Stephen Fry”. Or, to my mind, a human toffee apple.

Then there are the prejudices – hard to deny when confronted with these selected Clarkson quotes, from Clarkson on Cars (Virgin Books, 1996):

“If it turns out that a Malaysian customs officer cannot be bribed, I shall renounce Christianity and move to the Orkneys where, I'm told, everyone is Lucifer's best mate."

"We know also that the French are rude, the Italians are mad and the Dutch are a bunch of dope-smoking pornographers."

"Each Wednesday, I have to make a 120-mile journey from Nairobi, south London, to Bombay, near Birmingham."

"If you happen to be a homosexualist Cypriot, you cannot expect everyone in the whole borough to finance your perversion."

More famous, though never quite career-ending, were the controversial incidents: the apparent mumbled rendition of the eeny-meeny nursery rhyme with the n-word (after which Clarkson put out a video “begging for forgiveness” and claimed he had done everything he could to avoid using the word); the reference to a “slope” in Thailand (after which regret was expressed); and the time Clarkson had said he was confident he would not receive any complaints about comments regarding Mexico because the Mexican ambassador would be asleep, which drew a diplomatic protest (and an apology from the BBC). German and Indian diplomats have also had cause to raise concerns.

Sincere or not, Clarkson’s provocations are more carefully calibrated than they first appear. For example, he didn’t actually quite audibly utter the n-word. Clarkson always seems to know just how to push his luck, however sincere he may be or may not be, to stay within the law and the tolerance of his bosses. Hence, he understood full well that the Markle remarks, vile though there were, wouldn’t necessarily get him the sack or earn The Sun much censure under the toothless Ipso. Although The Sun did say it was “sincerely sorry” about the publication of the piece.

On other hand, he did perhaps have some inkling that it might cause some trouble and give him some attention, even at the cost of condemnation from his own daughter, Emily, for misogyny. Clarkson asked for the piece to be taken down and in its place, The Sun‘s website now has a copy of a tweet from Clarkson in which he said he made a “clumsy reference” and was “horrified to have caused so much hurt” and “would be more careful in future”.

In any case, it all adds a sort of tragic lustre to his ageing enfant-terrible image, the pub bore who gives his audience exactly what they want, pathetically validating their prejudices. He’s not daring.

As a journalist, you have to have some grudging admiration for the skill of the man. Like the Stig driving round the Top Gear test track on a wet afternoon in an AC Cobra, he knows exactly when to come off the throttle.

Except that is, when he came right off the road in 2015 and punched a hapless BBC producer who’d failed to secure Clarkson a hot dinner back at the hotel after another moderately tiring day messing around in cars. The director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, no less, publicly apologised for the incident, as if he’d been holding Clarkson’s leather jacket for him. Oisin Tymon, who Clarkson is alleged to have called a “lazy Irish c***”, was, in the BBC’s account, “subject to an unprovoked physical and verbal attack” during which he was “struck, resulting in swelling and bleeding to his lip”. The attack “lasted around 30 seconds and was halted by the intervention of a witness”. Tymon “offered no retaliation”.

The report added that Clarkson verbally abused Tymon “on more than one occasion – both during the attack and subsequently inside the hotel – and contained the strongest expletives and threats to sack him. The abuse was at such volume as to be heard in the dining room, and the shouting was audible in a hotel bedroom”.

According to Clarkson, the globally famous “fracas” happened shortly after his doctor had told him a lump on his tongue was likely cancer and that it should be checked out “immediately”, but Clarkson declined this as “Top Gear always came first”. He was stressed.

After that, and Top Gear could no longer come first, Clarkson took his two fellow hosts and producer Andy Wilman (a long-time Clarkson associate) to Amazon Prime and a future no less fun but maybe not as central to the life of the nation as it was when Clarkson was peak-time BBC1. Top Gear was his train set, as one of his collaborators once put it to me, erm, until it wasn’t.

As things stand now he’s kept his gigs with the Sunday Times and others of Rupert Murdoch’s titles, he’s nowhere near being fired from The Grand Tour by Amazon Prime (he’s all they’ve got) and even the progressive leaders of ITV let him stay on as host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? No doubt there’ll be many more programmes and books about that farm of his, the fees from which probably exceed his agricultural income. Like the ancestor who invented the Kilner food preservation that Clarkson discovered on Who Do You Think You Are?, Clarkson is very good at monetising his assets, and if he never worked again it wouldn’t matter in material terms – but it would dent old Motormouth’s ego.

In all sorts of ways it’s distasteful to dwell on Clarkson’s love life. But, he might say that the sight of his paunch muffining its way over the belt of his jeans can snap knicker elastic at 50 paces. He has been married twice. His current partner, Lisa Hogan, is Irish, and, by the way, not lazy.

It’s probably unwise to push the amateur psychology too far, but you have to wonder whether his ways might have something to do with his being bullied at school. It’s rather surprising to hear, given his larger-than-life personality, but he’s described how miserable he was at Repton boarding school, where he was picked on. In his own words he was “made to lick the lavatories clean” and suffered “all the usual humiliations that public school used back then to turn a small boy into a gibbering, sobbing, suicidal wreck”.

So there is a case for and against Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson, a mischievous chuckle never far from his lips. He’s often – too often – been placed on trial in the court of public opinion, and he’s always pretty much gotten away with everything, with the possible exception of losing his beloved Top Gear after he lost his temper.

The row about Meghan Markle is already subsiding, and the fact that it’s the most complained about article in the history of the relatively new press self-regulation body will perhaps be a source of quiet pride to the old rogue. He’s had the piece taken down, but it lives on infamy. He’s apologised, sort of. The chaps at ITV have said he doesn’t reflect their values. But, sooner or later, he’s bound to be a bit racist or sexist or something again, and we won’t be absolutely sure if he means it, and nor maybe will he have actually worked out what he really thinks. He won’t care, anyhow, so long as people read his stuff and watch his shows. And on that bombshell, a very happy Christmas.