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.
