Click here to see the
petition to make Jeremy Prime Minister
Some say he is the spawn of Beelzebub, put on Earth to lead mankind from the
slow lanes of righteousness on a wild, tyre-smoking ride to perdition.
Millions around the globe worship him and intone his heresies. His power
grows by the day and soon, if his British acolytes have their way, Jeremy
Clarkson will be installed as the next prime minister.
The 6ft 5in Top Gear presenter and Sunday Times columnist has until recently
been content to bestride the worlds of motoring, journalism and publishing.
But now more than 31,000 people, in thrall to Clarkson’s forthright opinions
and devilish charm, have signed a petition on the prime minister’s website
calling on Gordon Brown to step aside for the 47-year-old sage.
It may be sheer coincidence, of course, that the campaign was submitted by
someone called Joseph Dark. His followers’ idolatry is undisguised over on
the Facebook website, where an even bigger head of steam is building up.
More than 264,000 people have subscribed to a similar petition, which
states: “Clarkson is as close to a god [as] any mere mortal can get. His
straightforward nononsense attitude would make our country great once more.”
This is a man, remember, who in his column last weekend urged the Archbishop
of Canterbury to close down the Church of England with the words: “I tell
you this, beardie. Many, many more people have died in the name of God than
were killed in the name of Hitler.” This is a potential leader who has
compared getting behind the wheel of a Ford GT40 to “opening the Holy Grail
to find Cameron Diaz in there, naked and bored”.
The Clarkson effect is a modern phenomenon. Some 350m viewers worldwide tune
in to Top Gear, BBC2’s most popular programme, to watch the unholy trinity
of Clarkson and his sidekicks Richard (the Hamster) Hammond and James
(Captain Slow) May do violence to cars, play conkers with caravans and
indulge in blokey pranks. The multitudes devour his books: currently his
paperback And Another Thing is second in the Sunday Times bestseller list
and his latest tome, Don’t Stop Me Now, is the third hottest hardback.
The contagion affects all ages, from young boys who miraculously start reading
thanks to Clarkson, and teenage girls who giggle helplessly at his black
humour, to the old. Many express a powerlessness to resist. “Clarkson made
us do it,” wrote a couple who contributed £50 to the soldiers’ charity Help
for Heroes, which has raised £450,000 from Sunday Times readers since
Clarkson became its voluble patron.
“The Clarkson effect is incredible,” said Bryn Parry, the campaign’s
organiser. “When he put his weight behind us it became acceptable to support
the soldiers without implying that you were necessarily supporting the war.”
Clarkson outlined his political manifesto in The Sun yesterday. He plans to
begin by reversing all legislation made by Brown and Tony Blair since 1997 –
“transport, health, the war, the treatment of our soldiers, the EU, the
bloody environment, the hunting ban, the smoking ban, the endless tax
demands on motorists . . .”. Then he will break for lunch and a snooze
before going on holiday.
To many, a Clarkson regime sounds fun. But AA Gill, his friend and fellow
Sunday Times columnist, is compelled to disagree: “It couldn’t get any
wronger than having Jeremy in charge. I would have problems sending my child
to a nursery school that had Jeremy on the board of governors. I say this
with love and respect, but I just don’t want him ever to have a switch
that’s attached to anything.”
In Gill’s opinion, Clarkson’s “Canute-like” denial of global warming should
disqualify him from office: “He is the last man standing on the beach
commanding the glaciers’ melt waters to go back.” The only conceivable
advantage of having Clarkson as PM, Gill concedes, is that his wife,
Francie, might succeed him à la Hillary Clinton: “She’d be a fantastic prime
minister.” As the power behind the Clarkson throne, Francie brings order to
her husband’s hectic life, leaving him free to pursue his prolific writing
output in a converted stable block beside their large house in Chipping
Norton, Oxfordshire. Her explanation for the online petitions is that they
are the only protest vote that people get. “We haven’t got a Screaming Lord
Sutch any more. Jeremy represents the ‘none of the above’ category.”
Would he make a good prime minister? While not properly domesticated, she
ventures, he is a more rounded character than his popular image suggests:
“Yes, he’s opinionated and, yes, he does have habits which annoy me, like
leaving soggy cigarette ends by the sink, abandoning his socks under the
sofa and not replacing the loo roll. But he is a total pussycat underneath –
very sensitive and caring.” Visitors describe a harmonious household in
which Clarkson sets aside time for the upbringing of his three children,
Emily, 13, Finlo, 11, and Katya, 9. He has taught them to drive in his
grounds with the aim of taming their wilder instincts before they hit the
road. This is as well, for besides his Volvo C90, Mercedes and Lamborghini
Gallardo Spyder, the drive is usually cluttered with supercars on loan for
testing.
Francie met Clarkson while working as a successful recruitment consultant. “We
had mutual friends and ended up in the same restaurant one night. We had an
argument about whether it was better to be a man than a woman.” The couple
met again, “got drunk” and have been together ever since.
Clarkson has driven to the magnetic North Pole, dodged mortar rounds in Iraq
and flown upside down in fighter planes. But perhaps the former
public-school boy’s greatest achievement was tapping into the mind of the
common man.
He was born into a comfortable middle-class family in Doncaster; his parents,
Eddie and Shirley, sold Paddington Bear toys. At the fee-paying Repton
school in Derbyshire, he recalls, “fagging was brutal and I got bullied
horribly”, but so did all newcomers. He was a rebel who spent his spare time
visiting the local girls’ school and the pubs around Burton upon Trent. He
got nine O-levels but was expelled for mutinous behaviour 10 weeks before
his A-levels.
Public school taught him that “you never rat on your peers”. It is an
attitude, according to Gill, that has made Clarkson an “incredibly loyal”
friend: “He’s a continual teaser. It’s a very male thing – the exchange of
emotion between men by calling each other c****. Then there are flashes of
proper sweetness he hopes nobody will notice.”
After his first job as a Paddington Bear travelling salesman, Clarkson trained
on the Rotherham Advertiser, where he got the idea of syndicating motoring
columns. Launching his own motoring press agency in 1983, he moved to a
“vomitorium” pad in London, where unwary visitors got stuck to the carpet.
This background explains Clarkson’s meticulous approach to work, believes
Nicholas Rufford, editor of The Sunday Times’s InGear magazine: “He is an
old-school journalist who learnt his craft the hard way. He delivers copy on
time, word perfect, and can produce stories very quickly, even on a train.
His headed notepaper says, ‘Jeremy Clarkson, journalist’. That’s how he sees
himself.”
His first columns for Performance magazine revealed an effortlessly fluent
writer. The Top Gear job came about by accident when a BBC producer,
surrendering to the Clarkson effect, invited him onto the show. He presented
it from 1988 to 1999 and then again from 2002, when it was relaunched in a
new format.
Besides entertaining a lot of people, Britain’s biggest motormouth has put a
lot of noses out of joint. The “boring” Germans were not best pleased when
he said their cars “should be built with a sat nav that only goes to
Poland”. Nor were the Koreans when he reminded them that “a dog is not just
for Christmas. There should be some left over for Boxing Day”.
Is it passion or an act? “I care more about the colour of the gearknob on my
Mercedes SLK than the amount of carbon dioxide it produces,” Clarkson
proclaimed. But Gill reveals a dark secret of the Clarkson household: “In
his kitchen he scrupulously separates all his rubbish into recyclable and
nonrecyclable items.” And, Gill says: “He is far, far cleverer than he lets
on.”
