Jeremy clarkson

Portrait of the week | 12 March 2015

Home Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that ‘a huge burden of responsibility’ lay with those who acted as apologists for those who committed acts of terror. Parliament approved new obligations for passenger carriers to restrict the travel to or from Britain of people named as a terrorist threat. The Charity Commission required the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Roddick Foundation to give unequivocal assurances that they had ceased funding Cage, the advocacy group known for speaking up for Mohammed Emwazi, the British jihadist involved in videos of Islamic State murders. England were knocked out of the Cricket World Cup. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found himself

BBC catering is enough to make anyone resort to violence

Yesterday Jeremy Clarkson was suspended from Top Gear by the BBC following a ‘fracas’ with a member of staff. Today, the Telegraph reports that the incident occurred on set in Newcastle after the Top Gear presenter grew angry about the lack of catering arrangements for the crew, allegedly leading him to punch a show producer. While sources close to Clarkson deny any punch-up occurred, the BBC are still pushing ahead with plans to drop the remaining Top Gear episodes from their broadcasting schedule. This has not gone down well with Clarkson, who appeared to let his feelings known when he retweeted an upset fan on Twitter: @JeremyClarkson how can @BBC not show the remaining episodes of

Jeremy Clarkson suspended from Top Gear

Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended from Top Gear following an alleged ‘fracas’ with a producer. What’s more, there will be no episode airing this Sunday while the BBC looks into the incident. A BBC spokesman confirms the suspension: ‘Following a fracas with a BBC producer, Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended pending an investigation. No one else has been suspended. Top Gear will not be broadcast this Sunday. The BBC will be making no further comment at this time.’ While no more details are currently known regarding the incident, the news is likely to cheer Clarkson’s critics who have been calling for his suspension for some time now. Last year the Top

Rod Liddle

I suspected the ‘liberal’ fascists would eventually get Jeremy Clarkson

I read that Jeremy Clarkson had been suspended by the BBC for ‘a fracas’ with a producer. We don’t know what happened yet – but that hasn’t stopped my phone ringing with requests for interviews from Channel Four News (natch) and, yes, the BBC – the producers beside themselves with glee. And already one witless columnist – the staggeringly hopeless Deborah Orr in the Guardian, who nobody has ever read voluntarily – demanding Clarkson resign. Before this imbecilic woman knows even the slightest about what has taken place. Strike one up for the usual ‘liberal’ fascism. What’s he done? Dunno – but sack the bastard anyway. Evil, stupid, people. I

I’ll take Jeremy Clarkson over a howling mob any day

Perhaps it’s a glaring and personal flaw in my observational skills, but if somebody tried to insult me via a number plate attached to their car, I’m not at all sure I’d notice. I suppose if it was really obvious — ‘HUGO TWAT’ sort of thing — then the synapses would fire, but anything more subtle would pass me by. And I don’t think it’s just me. Imagine, for example, driving through Scotland in a car with the registration ‘H746 CLN’. How likely is it, do you think, that some super-observant thug would interpret this as a reference to the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and then gather together a posse to

Stop “Stoptober”! It’s another insidious attack on liberty and free will

Say what you like about the French Revolutionaries but at least they had a poetic imagination. When they wanted a new name for October, they anticipated Keats and named the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ‘Brumaire’, meaning ‘foggy’. Which is a lot more evocative, I think we can agree, than its current incarnation under the new politically correct Terror: Stoptober. Stoptober. Geddit? That’s ‘-ober’, as in the second half of ‘October’, with the word ‘Stop’ cunningly positioned where the ‘Oct’ would normally be. And what marketing genius was responsible for this rebranding? Why, someone from an Orwellian body which you’d probably much prefer didn’t exist, let alone to have

Frankie Boyle is a cowardly bully, and I’m ashamed I ever stood up for him

‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’ Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report? Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times. Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly. In the current climate it’s about as heroically contentious as, say, a private school prospectus that promises ‘We believe in educating the whole person’; or a

Should I report my boyfriend to the police?

Driving along in the car, listening to the radio news, the boyfriend turned to me and said he thought the Michael Fabricant row a very strange one. Fabricant was being pilloried for having tweeted that he could never go on television with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown because he might ‘end up punching her in the throat’, but my man said he didn’t see what the fuss was about. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I feel like punching you about 50 times a day.’ Reader, be assured, he was joking. Victims’ groups, hold your horses while I explain. My beloved was pretending to have punching urges for the purposes of humour. Do you see?

Jeremy Clarkson brings Yuletide joy to the Delingpole household

So I’m looking at the seasonal TV schedules trying to find something — anything — to watch. Britain and the Sea? Probably very well done, but David Dimbleby is such a dangerously feline, OE-manqué, Flashmanesque, living-embodiment-of-the-BBC closet pinko that reviewing it would feel wrong, somehow, like chipping into a fund to buy Chris Huhne an eighth home. The Doctor Who Christmas Special? But it always makes me want to kill myself. I hate the idea that a Dalek garlanded in tinsel might burst into the Cratchit household with a fat goose dangling from its exterminator gun while the White Witch’s frozen heart melts and all the crippled children are released

Bizarre Cars, by Keith Ray – review

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many tokens, and with the casuistry of both Calvinist and Jesuit, it has been possible for the author of this pretty little Christmas-stocking book to include as bizarre any vehicle he chooses, including motorcycles and the micro-cars that made motoring possible after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Without these categories, a bus-cum-truck-cum-tractor,variations on the Hummer and the stretched limousine, and too many excursions into the bizarrerie of car names that in other languages have meanings genital and scatalogical, this book would be very thin. Yet even the vehicles that are

Clarissa Tan experiences the greatest show on earth, and laughs

I watched Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday) for the first time in my life last week (the rock under which I’ve been living is pretty large, practically a boulder). I thought I’d better plug this knowledge gap before it got too embarrassing, seeing that Top Gear is the greatest show on earth, the travelling Big Top de nos jours, a daredevil combo of acrobatic stunts, mechanical wizardry and freakery. Fakery too, apparently, as it’s emerged that in a recent episode scenes that looked spontaneous were actually staged. These involved flashes of watery chaos, upturned tables and angry diners shaking their fists as an amphibious vehicle hastily built and even more hastily

Shelf Life: James Naughtie

James Naughtie explains why he’d give Scoop to a lover, confesses which books by another BBC luminary he does his best to avoid and finally reassures us, in case you were wondering, that he doesn’t fantasise about Lolita. He will be appearing at the Wimbledon Bookfest on 14th October to talk about his latest book, The New Elizabethans (published by Collins on 11th October, £25). He tweets @naughtiej   1). What are you reading at the moment? The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s fabulous biography of Lyndon Johnson; and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, about our ancient pathways, which is blissful. 2). As a child,