Naturally, Jeremy Clarkson had expected some kind of attack. Addressing an
assembly of engineering students at Oxford Brookes University last week, he
began: “I fully expected to be speaking to you today covered in flour and
eggs, like a giant human pancake.”
The Sunday Times
columnist and presenter of BBC2’s Top Gear had come to collect an honorary
degree, awarded in recognition of his long-standing support for engineering.
Only after his speech finished was his dire prediction fulfilled — give or
take the odd ingredient — by a woman named Rebecca Lush.
Clarkson
had disappeared into a marquee, Lush recalls. “But then he came out again,
so I ran after him.” Catching up, she leapt high into the air and copped the
motoring writer of the year in the face with a homemade, organic banana
meringue. In case you imagined otherwise, that’s not as easy as it sounds:
“He’s a bloody huge guy, 6ft 4in. Hitting him in the face was like playing
basketball.”
Having completed her mission, Lush, 33, kept
moving. “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.”
In the event, Clarkson’s
response was generous. He congratulated his assailant: “Great shot!” The
only criticism he offered, while the assembled photographers happily snapped
away, was to state that the meringue tasted too sweet.
“It’s
unfortunate that I was terribly jet-lagged,” he says now. “Otherwise I would
have guessed that something was up when the photographers said, ‘Would you
mind stepping over there, 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
for the environmentalists. One-nil to them.”
But how did it
come to this? Why has Clarkson, who brings joy to so many, become the bête
noire of the environmental movement? Why did thousands sign a petition
urging Oxford Brookes to withdraw the honour? And what motivated this
particular woman to do more than sign up — to bake a banana meringue and
convey it far from home to sully the face and robes of a man she’d never
met?
Clarkson was nominated for supporting high standards in
engineering — something he showed most notably by championing Brunel as the
greatest Briton in the BBC series in 2002; and, as a passenger on the last
BA Concorde flight a year later, by paraphrasing Neil Armstrong to describe
the retirement of that engineering classic: “This is one small step for a
man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind.”
But his work
has also earned him the ire of the green movement. On Top Gear, Clarkson
drove through virgin peat bogs in a 4x4 and tore up road safety information
on camera. Racing against colleagues, he drove a Ferrari more or less
nonstop from London to Switzerland and was stopped by police for speeding.
And in February this year the BBC paid £250 in compensation to a parish
council in Somerset after Clarkson deliberately rammed a Toyota pick-up into
a 30-year-old horse chestnut.
Clarkson is unrepentant. “The parish
council is funded by central government, which is funded by me, so it’s my
tree. Anyway, there was no damage.”
Environmentalists
believe that what Clarkson says and does on screen encourages others to copy
him. He recently vowed to kill cyclists “for fun” if they failed to respect
the Highway Code — a promise that has provoked furious debate on the pages
of cycling magazines and websites.
But Clarkson refuses to accept
that he’s a role model. “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, then why do you think someone else would?’ ”
All
the same, the environmental pressure group Transport 2000 said the decision
to honour Clarkson at a serious academic institution was like Scotland Yard
paying tribute to the work of Inspector Clouseau. And more than 3,100 people
signed that petition: not only environmentalists and members of Oxford
council but also staff and students at Oxford Brookes, and workers at the
nearby Cowley BMW factory who are angry at his repeated criticism of their
former colleagues at MG Rover, which is in administration.
In
Lush, Clarkson was confronted by someone whose obsession with cars, though
less well known than his, has been no less consuming. The main difference
between them is that Clarkson loves motors and Lush hates them.
In
1993 Lush was jailed for four months for her part in protests against road
building on Twyford Down. “It wasn’t nice. But the support we got was
incredible. It was the first time environmental activists had been sent to
prison, and it really inspired people. I received 100 letters a day,” she
says.
Her motivation has always been climate change. “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.”
Like
many activists, Lush eased off after Labour came to power in 1997. “We
stepped back because we had won. Labour came to power and said, ‘No more
roads’. And John Prescott set up his commission for integrated transport.”
So she moved into campaigning against genetically modified crops and got a
job driving a bus.
But about the time of the fuel protests of
2000, the government seemed to change its mind on transport issues, and Lush
became active again. She set up an anti-roads alliance, Road Block, and
began chucking pies. She put one in the face of the American envoy to the
environmental talks at the Hague and another on the transport secretary,
Alistair Darling.
More recently, she chained herself to a digger
for more than two hours before a specialist team removed her. And she
reduced to chaos a meeting to discuss the planned Thames Gateway bridge
public inquiry by snatching the inspector’s microphone and shouting, as she
was chased around a table: “This is a scandal. The bridge is being
railroaded through. You are not listening.”
Isn’t this
childish? Not at all, she insists. “You grab attention through direct
action. 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, 10 to 15 years later, the ideas
have become mainstream.”
With some pride, she adds that Lord
Hoffmann, an appeal judge, told her in the early 1990s that “civil
disobedience in this country is an honourable tradition, and those who take
part in it may be vindicated by history”. (All the same, he rejected her
appeal against imprisonment.)
Having dispatched Clarkson, Lush
prepared to tackle other prominent petrolheads: the fuel protesters. “They
are ignorant of basic economics. 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.”
And
what about Clarkson? Will he ever be reconciled with the greens? “I don’t
want to be their bête noire,” he insists. “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 pies in
my face.”
Not literally, of course, but here’s what he
means: “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
is 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.”
THIS
IS WHY YOU SHOULD CARE, JEREMY
When I landed that pie on
Jeremy Clarkson’s smug, self-satisfied face I could almost hear the cheers
resounding around the country.
When the text messages and e-mails
started arriving they confirmed how much joy I had caused. Just deserts for
Clarkson was the theme.
In fact, it wasn’t any ordinary pie. It
was a fair trade organic home-baked banana meringue, chosen because I knew
that every politically correct element of it would irritate Motor Mouth all
the more.
His childish and sexist response — calling me
“premenstrual” and an “angry bird” — insults that, like him, hark back to
the 1970s, show how outdated Clarkson and his values really are.
What
he has discovered is that the environmental movement has a sense of humour
too — but a very different one from his. And what has been clear to most of
us in that movement is that Clarkson needed bringing down a peg or two.
The
environmental movement has many detractors, and none of us would argue that
we should be exempt from criticism, but recently his attacks have gone
beyond fair comment and are edging dangerously close to incitement to kill.
Take,
for example, his tasteless comments after the terrorist attacks in London,
when thousands of people took to cycling. In comments in The Sun, he said he
would run down “for fun” cyclists who cruise through red lights. I dread
that one of his fans will one day take him seriously.
Then there’s
his attitude to climate change. In January this year he wrote: “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.
“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.”
Well, it wasn’t North Carolina, it
was New Orleans. And if the scientists are right, there could be many more
like it.
Of course, Clarkson has every right to make an idiot of
himself in the media, and he does it with panache. The problem is the
opposite point of view gets heard much less often.
Let me explain
why we should care about climate change. Jeremy is right to point out that
other people will be affected by it before we will: it threatens to throw
the world into food deficit by 2030, creating a humanitarian disaster in
Africa and south Asia. Anything bothering you yet?
When I became
an eco-activist at Twyford Down in the first days of the anti-roads movement
in 1992, I was motivated by my fear about climate change. We were 10 years
ahead of our time. At last climate change is recognised in the words of Tony
Blair as the “most serious threat to mankind”.
Clarkson
was rewarded by Oxford Brookes for services to engineering. In his view,
engineering and environment are opposites. But climate change can be tackled
only with the help of better engineering and new technologies. Everyone
seems to have twigged this, except Jeremy and Oxford Brookes.
Clarkson’s
pie was awarded for services to public ignorance. Next on my list? Well, I’m
still baking.
