If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  Certainly, I wouldn’t trust the deputy assistant to the equalities officer on a council to manage a village hall tombola, let alone the distribution of hundreds of millions of pounds. But that’s exactly what the government decided to do …

  After a little while the government started to ask if the councils were happy to have been sent a large amount of money. And it turned out, amazingly, that they were. Thrilled, in fact. Overjoyed.

  They sent reports to London saying the scheme had been a huge success. And they released figures showing that 90 per cent of about 117,000 families selected to benefit from the handouts had turned their lives around and become model citizens. They really did. They said that 90 per cent had been cured of their sloth and their violent tendencies and had turned over a new leaf.

  And what’s more, they argued that, having invested £448 million in the scheme, the government had saved £1.2 billion, thanks to a reduction in the cost of policing and providing truant officers and benefits, and so on.

  Back in Whitehall, the government believed them. It really and genuinely thought that £448 million had solved the nation’s great divide. It also believed, amazingly, that it had got a threefold return on its investment almost instantaneously. So, figuring that the more it handed out, the more it would save, it decided to give the councils £900 million to share among a whopping 400,000 families. With a net that wide, even Elton John was likely to get a knock on the door asking if he’d like a bit of extra cash.

  The way this whole enterprise was being described, you’d imagine the police in places such as Barnsley and Preston were shutting up the stations at night because there was simply nothing to do any more. Naturally, when I read about it, I saw in my mind classrooms full of rosy-cheeked children, all with their hands up, eager to answer the teacher’s question. And, outside, parents in well-cut jeans talking about the lovely little bar they’d found in Val d’Isère last year.

  However, and this will come as a surprise to no one at all, it seems councils may have exaggerated the benefits of having a money-distribution van. Because a report released last week found that the scheme had no impact. The people who wrote it actually used those words. It had ‘no impact’. As in: none. Diddly-squat. Zilch.

  Nearly half the families who took part in the scheme were still claiming benefits a year and a half later. And you find the same percentage among similar families who did not take part. Truancy levels were no different either. And neither were the numbers of those being cautioned or convicted of a criminal offence. This means the government has in effect thrown away more than £1.3 billion.

  It makes my shoulders sag, because surely by now people with a modicum of intelligence must know that social engineering just doesn’t work. Give everyone in the country a quid and by next week two people will be multimillionaires and everyone else will have nothing. That’s just a fact.

  Give 400,000 jobless fatties nearly a billion quid and by next week all of it will be in the hands of Allied Breweries, Ladbrokes and Pablo Escobar. You can’t change that.

  We’ve watched countless leaders in countless countries attempt to level the playing field. And they’ve all failed. The only reason Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters haven’t realized this is because, mostly, they haven’t grown up yet. And they haven’t been to Cuba. Certainly, they haven’t realized that some people are born to be rich and some are born to be poor.

  Trying to do something about this is as impossible as deciding that life would be fairer if everyone were good-looking. Yes. But some of us aren’t. And there’s nothing that can be done to change that.

  So, Mrs May. Here’s a tip. The next time there are riots, don’t spray anyone with money. Spray them instead with a water cannon.

  23 October 2016

  Pipe down and come with me on a tour of Trump’s Britain

  Almost all my friends are bleeding-heart liberals. They weep when they see pictures of those poor Syrian children having their backs waxed to make them look younger. They host fundraising evenings to buy padded bras for people with transgender issues and they are utterly bewildered and devastated by the Brexit vote.

  They cannot understand why we are having to leave the EU, because everyone they ever meet, in every pastry shop and at every dinner party and on the touchline of every school sports pitch, wanted to remain. I’ve tried mentioning Barnsley, but to them it’s the pretty little Cotswold village they pass through on the way to Babington House. ‘Liz Hurley used to live there,’ they say, wondering why my eyes are rolling.

  Of course, they are completely stunned by the Donald Trump thing, because the Americans they know seem so sensible. ‘I was with Gwyneth only last night, trying out some of her new smoothies, and she’s such a lovely girl …’ Then they wander off to talk to Gary Lineker.

  He’s their new messiah. He started off by preaching about the awfulness of Brexit, moved through the iniquities of immigration and is now in full Bible-thumping mode on Trump. In Gary’s mind, everyone’s a racist or a sexist or a bully or a homophobe, and his disciples are to be found applauding wildly. My friends love him.

  They can’t understand the US election result, because they all go to America a lot and to them the place always seems so reasonable. They stay at the Mercer in New York and Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, California. And they’ve all partied with Sean Penn and Jay-Z and Bruce, all of whom were behind Hillary Clinton. And yet, somehow, she lost.

  Naturally, my mates have decided that everyone who lives between the Mercer and Shutters is stupid because they either voted for Trump or they didn’t vote at all. And now they are all wondering out loud whether democracy has had its time. If I were to suggest that people with low IQs should be given less of a say in who runs a country than those in Mensa, most would nod sagely and say pensively, ‘It may have to come to that, because it’s ridiculous that my cleaning lady has the same influence in an election as me.’

  Yes, but this would mean that, for the rest of time, our leaders would continue to be cut-out’n’repeat clones of Mr Blair and Mrs Clinton and Mr Cameron. And they’d continue to push for gay rights and transgender traffic lights and cycle lanes and anti-bullying campaigns and tougher rules on hate crimes and more immigration and lower speed limits and healthier polar bears. And they’d be warmly hugged by everyone they met for their tireless campaign to make saying ‘period’ a crime.

  But I’ll let you into a little secret. All the words I cannot use any more in this newspaper. All those jokes no one can say any more on television. All those phrases that are no longer socially acceptable in Notting Hill and the Home Counties. Well, up north, you will hear all of them, all the time. Political correctness simply does not exist in a Doncaster pub. Because there’s no time to worry about the correct word for ‘cross-dresser’ when you haven’t got any money.

  In parts of America there are people who spend all day in the cold, freezing half to death in a queue for the food bank. Many have no warm clothes or teeth and, forgive my language, but exactly how much of a shit do you think they give about transgender issues or the effing polar bears?

  And it’s not just America. In the parts of Britain that my friends see only from their Range Rover windows as they drive to Scotland for a bit of shooting, there are towns and villages that are full of young people who have nothing to do all day but mate. ‘Dims breeding dims,’ is what my grandfather used to say.

  Every time there’s an election, a politician comes on the television they’ve half-inched from the social to say he will make life better for the underprivileged. So they vote for him and then find out later that his idea of ‘underprivileged’ is actually someone who wants to dress up in a frock.

  Yes, my heart bleeds for those who are bullied because of their sex or their looks or their sexual orientation. Yes, it bleeds for the dispossessed of Syria and the victims of female genital mutilation in Egypt. But it only bleeds because I’ve got a ton of money and two houses. If I had an empty larder and a rash and a terrible h
acking cough, I assure you of this: I wouldn’t care a bit.

  Trump talked a lot of nonsense in his campaign, and I think, if I was to meet him, I’d dislike him on a cellular level. However, he maintained throughout that politicians had let the poor down. Kerching. He said they would always let the poor down. Ker-ching again. And the only thing that could provide them with jobs and money was business. Big ker-ching. They liked the sound of that and said to themselves, ‘Yup. The future’s bright. The future’s orange.’

  It was the same story here with Brexit. Poor people in the north of England were given a chance to poke the liberal elite of London in the eye. And they took it.

  And it’s going to get worse. Because the more we continue to ram political correctness and cycle lanes and environmentalism down everyone’s throats, the more they’ll think, ‘Oh why don’t you sod off, you southern poofs.’

  We will end up with extremism. A lunatic party will sweep into office on a tide of resentfulness. We will have our own Trump in Number Ten.

  Happily, however, I have a solution. The Palace of Westminster is to be closed for essential refurbishments. This means MPs will have to meet somewhere else, and I reckon they should all go to Hartlepool. Because after a few years in this former steel town they might start to understand that in the big scheme of things Eddie Izzard’s right to wear a pink beret is not that important.

  13 November 2016

  O Adrian, who will make me laugh now?

  In 1981 there was a big working-men’s pub in Earls Court, and on Cheltenham Gold Cup day it was crammed because, unusually for the times, the race was being shown on a television above the bar.

  The whole place was a seething cauldron of braying Irish labourers and sloshing Guinness and cheap cigarette smoke until, with two furlongs to go, the door burst open and a lunatic dashed in. He leapt on to the bar, turned the television off and then ran out again. Welcome, everyone, to the man who would become my closest friend: A. A. Gill.

  He was living back then in a dog basket in Kensington, dealing drugs to pay for his colossal thirst and hanging out with a group of very posh heroin addicts who spent their days forgetting to go to the funerals of their flatmates and friends. That he didn’t croak then, in a puddle of his own urine and vomit, is a miracle.

  But he has now. He died last weekend, leaving us with a body of work that beggars belief. It beggars belief partly because he didn’t start writing until he was thirty-eight but mostly because of his profound dyslexia. He’d have had a better chance of getting his letters in the right order if he’d lobbed a tin of alphabet soup into a ceiling fan. He’d often text me to say where we were having lunch and I’d have to use a Turing decoder to work out what the bloody hell he meant. ‘Twersy’, for instance, was ‘the Wolseley’.

  The way Adrian dealt with this was a lesson to all sufferers today. History was his favourite subject at school, but he always got a bad mark so he asked his teacher why. You’re one of the best in class, said the teacher, but you’ve got a problem with your writing. Adrian decided angrily that he didn’t have the problem; the teacher did. And he vowed ever afterwards to make it someone else’s problem, not his own.

  Adrian struggled, too, with reading. It would take him half an hour to read the inscription on a statue or a war memorial, which is something he did a lot, and yet somehow he knew everything about everything.

  Why do the lampposts on the Mall have ships on them? Who invented chewing gum? How do the pirates off Somalia operate? All of that – and all of everything else – somehow was in his head. ‘Polymath’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. He was Wikipedia with a cravat.

  But his real gift, as we all know, because he was the cornerstone of all our Sunday mornings, was not just delivering the facts. It was making them come alive. Once, when I was away, he wrote my motoring column and said his TVR sounded like two lesbians in a bucket. It remains the best description yet of the noise a V8 makes at tickover. And it wasn’t even his specialist subject.

  He also said that an Aston Martin sounded like Tom Jones bending over to pick up the soap in a Strangeways shower. And more recently, my new television show is ‘Top Gear in witness protection’. No one, and I do mean no one, could phrase-make like him.

  And lines such as this didn’t come to him after hours of pacing up and down and sucking on the end of a Biro. They were a constant soundtrack to his life. We were flying once to Blackpool, at night, in a helicopter. And after a long period of zooming over nothing but inky blackness we passed over the sodium-orange glow of a town. ‘What’s that?’ Adrian said to the pilot. A check on the map revealed it to be Preston. Adrian looked at it quizzically for a moment. ‘What’s the point of that?’ he asked.

  Later he met a Tory Cabinet minister who blustered on and on about how important it was for people to get on their bikes and make something of their lives: start a business, perhaps. ‘That’s what I did when I was young,’ said Adrian enthusiastically. The Tory went into a back-slapping, that’s-the-ticket routine, which was cut short when Adrian said, ‘Yeah. I was a drug dealer.’

  Over the years, Adrian stopped the drugs and the booze and even the cigarettes by becoming addicted to other stuff. Mostly this involved buying trousers. I think he bought a new pair most days. And another cravat. And a cardigan or two. And perhaps another stupid suit, lined this time with all the flags of Siena’s contrade.

  Which brings us on to the man. He was unfathomable, really. Because he was a screamingly camp straight man, an un-Christian believer and a potty-mouthed poet. ‘C***’ was pretty much his favourite word.

  It’s been reported that he was upset and bitter about being denied expensive treatment for the cancer that killed him. But he wasn’t. He accepted it. Because he was a terrible old leftie who thought like a Tory. Or it might have been the other way round. I never really knew.

  Occasionally, when we wrote pieces together, we’d plan them so I’d have one opinion and he’d have another. But as often as not he’d get to where we were going and he’d change his mind. We went to Midland in Texas, which I knew he’d think was a hellhole, and he loved it. So I took him to France, which he had always loathed, and he decided as soon as we arrived that he didn’t.

  Before he died we were planning to write a piece together about whether Italians were more interested in food or cars. If it had happened, I just know he’d have said the Fiat 500 was way more important than some silly bits of fish in a tomato sauce. (Which it is, by the way.)

  It sounds as if he was a contrarian, but he actually wasn’t. He just had opinions, and sometimes they’d change and sometimes they wouldn’t, and sometimes they’d contradict one another. And he really, really, didn’t care if you agreed with him or not.

  Nor did he have an off button. If he thought your new sofa was ghastly, he’d tell you. And if you’d put on a bit of weight, he’d bring it up. Once an artist proudly showed him their work and he said, ‘That’s amazing. How long have you been painting with your feet?’

  I’d watch people sometimes, spooling up for an argument with him, and I’d sit there thinking, ‘Oh, no. Don’t poke the beast. Don’t poke it.’ But they usually did, and then he’d eviscerate them, because he was faster than they were, and funnier and cleverer.

  It’s been said that Adrian and I were very close, and we were. But the truth is, he was close to thousands and thousands of people. If you walked down any street in what he called London – nothing with an ‘E’ or an ‘N’ in the postcode – you’d have to stop every twenty feet so he could embrace someone coming the other way. In every restaurant it would take him twenty minutes to get to his table because of all the hugs and wide-eyed ‘daaaaaahlings’ he’d have to do on the way. It seemed sometimes that he knew everyone.

  Three days before he died he had Hillary Clinton’s former security adviser, James Rubin, on one side of his hospital bed, reading him bits from the Guardian, and Rebekah Brooks on the other. Then in came the designer Tom Ford to talk spectacles.
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br />   He had thousands and thousands of friends because, deep down, he was kind, warm-hearted and extremely loyal. But by far and away his greatest gift was his ability to make people laugh. Me especially. When we broke our golf virginity together in Cheshire, I damn nearly hacked up my own spleen. When he decided it would be quicker to kick the ball round the course, I honestly thought, ‘If I don’t breathe in soon, I’m going to die.’

  It was the same story when he accidentally reversed an Abrams main battle tank into an ornamental lake in the middle of Baghdad, or on shoots when we’d spend all day trying to land birds on each other’s head. Or when I opened the paper and saw the restaurant he’d reviewed had been given no stars. ‘Oh, this is going to be good …’ I’d think. And it always, always was.

  Yes, he was brilliant at writing serious stories about serious issues. And he was brilliant also at picking apart a television programme or telling you why it’s a good idea to put nutmeg on cauliflower cheese (which it isn’t). But he was at his absolute best when he was being funny.

  Towards the end, he and I were sitting around in Whitby with the comedian Jimmy Carr. Adrian announced he’d just started to watch the Westworld series on the television.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Jimmy. ‘That’s a bit ambitious – it’s a ten-parter.’

  It’s the last time I heard Adrian burst out laughing. And that’s what I’ll miss most of all. Well, that, and every other bit of him.

  18 December 2016

  For a healthier, happier you, just live like it’s 1617

  Doubtless you have awoken this morning full of steely-eyed resolve to become a new person in 2017 – fitter, healthier, thinner and less full of drink and smoke. But it won’t work. It never does. Because being healthy and fit and sober is boring.