If You'd Just Let Me Finish

by Jeremy Clarkson

  The hand-wringing liberals, though, see things differently. They reckon that Trump’s tiny little index finger will soon be used to fire one of America’s 450 Minuteman III nukes at Pyongyang and that the only way to stop him is through the anti-nuclear movement.

  For those of you who are too young to remember, in the 1970s and 1980s the anti-nuclear movement was a hilarious collection of former communists and IRA sympathizers who reckoned that if they could get Britain to abandon its nuclear weapons it’d be easier for the Soviets to take control.

  As is always the way with the left, the whole movement eventually splintered into a million factions such as the Judean People’s Front of Nuclear Disarmament and the Judean Popular People’s Front of European Disarmament, and then eventually everyone drifted off to become anti-capitalism, anti-G8 eco-warriors instead.

  History tells us that the Cold War was eventually ended by Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood-trained straight face as he outlined the ‘Star Wars’ defence system, a system he knew the Russians couldn’t copy because it didn’t and couldn’t actually exist. And Mikhail Gorbachev’s foolishness in believing it might. But according to the weird beards, the Berlin Wall was brought down by a bunch of women who in 1981 went to Newbury and chained themselves to a fence.

  These are not to be confused with those who protested about the Newbury bypass by living in trees and digging tunnels like badgers. Impersonating animals and birds was never going to stop a government. But there are those who think that some light bondage did actually do the trick.

  And because of this, they reckon that Kim, Trump and the various leaders in Pakistan, India and Iran could be brought to heel if only enough people would walk slowly down Whitehall with a Jo Malone candle.

  Furthermore, it would cause all the world’s terrorists to give up their fight with the infidel and stop scouring Aldermaston’s wheelie bins for the ingredients to make a dirty bomb.

  I wish them well, partly because the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – CND – and the ideals of the protest movement generated some excellent music: ‘99 Red Balloons’ and ‘Morning Dew’ spring immediately to mind. I even liked the badge. And, my God, I’d rather listen to some weeping hippies droning on about strontium-90 than this turgid and never-ending debate about Brexit.

  But mostly I wish them well because the anti-nuclear movement is such a fantastically amusing idea.

  Because you can’t campaign for the abolition of something that exists. It’s like calling for an end to weather, or dogs. The nuclear bomb was invented and, unless someone comes up with a Men in Black-style memory-wiper stick, it’ll never go away.

  I agree, of course, that if a terrorist were to atomize London, it’d be hard for Theresa May to retaliate, because what co-ordinates would be fed to the subs? A house just north of Manchester? A block of flats in West Bromwich? Nukes work only as a deterrent against governments. Specifically, governments that are being run by people whose extended families would get irradiated by the return blow.

  However, saying that we shouldn’t have a nuclear arsenal because it will protect us from only a certain type of enemy is like saying you won’t take medical precautions when travelling in the tropics because they protect you from only a certain kind of disease. Better, in my book, to cover some of the bases than none at all.

  Which brings us on to the new darling of the hand-wringing liberals, the manhole-cover enthusiast and aspiring vegan Jeremy Corbyn. It’s possible, or even likely, that he will be our next prime minister, and this is seen as a good thing by the Guardianistas because he’s a man of peace. He even has a beard to prove the point. And yet he’s on record as saying he would use nuclear weapons.

  The only reason the liberals love him is that he qualified this by saying he’d be ‘extremely cautious’ about it. As opposed to what? That he’d do it on a whim? Or for a bet while pissed at a party?

  The fact is that no single invention has saved more lives than the nuclear bomb. Without it, Russia and America would have started fighting in about 1958 and in all probability would still be at it now.

  And nuclear power means millions of tons of carbon dioxide are not in the upper atmosphere making hurricanes more powerful, but still in the ground.

  So I think we should encourage the people at CND, but only if someone else starts up an organization that champions the peace and clean energy that nuclear tech has brought to the world.

  10 September 2017

  Nab him, grab him, stop that pigeon – and let the homeless eat him now

  As we know, there are a great many mad people in the south-western bit of the country. They claim often that a black panther is living on Exmoor and that, if you paint a picture, it’ll be better if you are standing on a ley line.

  And now the people of Exeter are saying that homeless people, many of whom may be from Poland, are roaming the streets at night eating pigeons. There are fears this could get out of hand with a local police community support officer saying, ‘Now we’re eating pigeons, now we’re killing seagulls. It escalates.’

  One resident said she saw two men pounce on a pigeon and put it in a sack and in the space of twenty minutes they’d captured fourteen of them. This has made the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds very angry, with a spokesman describing the incident as ‘horrible’.

  ‘Unlikely’ is nearer the mark, though. I knew a man once who wore a suit, played a lot of golf and had never had so much as a parking ticket. But one day, while walking to work over Waterloo Bridge, he remembered being told that you can never kick a pigeon, because it has a housefly-like ability to get out of the way before your foot arrives. And for reasons that haunted him for the rest of his life, he decided to put the theory to the test.

  So, in front of all the other suited-and-booted Margaret Thatcher enthusiasts, he took an almighty swing at the bird strutting about in his path and – wallop – it sailed six feet into the air and crashed back down to Earth, stone dead. This proved, much to his embarrassment, that you can kick a pigeon to death.

  I had a similar moment in northern Spain about ten years ago. I was out and about in the packed streets of San Sebastián when I noticed a listless pigeon sitting on a windowsill. ‘I’ll put that out of its misery,’ I thought, and tried to break its neck. But the manoeuvre went wrong and its head came off, which caused the body to fall to the floor, where, much to the horror of the many onlookers, it flapped about for several minutes before it decided there was no point any more and lay still.

  The weird thing is that this was Spain, where stabbing cows and throwing donkeys off tower blocks is basically like Swingball. And yet they were horrified that I’d pulled a pigeon’s head off.

  I think the problem is that we learn from an early age that pigeons are clever. That you can take one to Berlin and it is able to find its way back to its loft in Peterborough.

  The Nazis certainly thought this way. Heinrich Himmler was a pigeon enthusiast and made plans for birds to be used to convey messages from agents ahead of an invasion of Britain.

  And when authorities here got wind of this, instead of saying, ‘Oh, don’t be stupid. Why would you use a bird to convey a message when you have a radio?’, they decided the south coast should be patrolled by falcons. And in the Scilly Isles, it really was. That really did happen. It was the Battle of Britain, with feathers.

  That legacy lives on in the way people react when pigeons are being harmed. But the thing is that salmon can also home and no one minds when Jeremy Paxman hauls one of those from a river and clubs it to death. Or when a little old lady buys a tin of its flesh and feeds it to her cat.

  The fact is, though, that unlike salmon, pigeons are a menace. In towns their muck ruins buildings and in the countryside they can do more damage to crops than an army of drunken students with an alien fixation and a garden roller. If you shoot a pigeon – which is harder than kicking one, I assure you – and you open it up, you’ll find more grain in its stomach than in the silos at Hovis.

&n
bsp; Which brings us back to the issues in Exeter. If you are fit and sober and you have a gun, it is only just possible to kill a fit pigeon. So I’m suspicious of the story that these homeless drunks are able, in the space of twenty minutes, to get fourteen live birds into a sack. (I feel a game show coming on here.)

  Let’s just say, though, that they are able, through the fog of strong cider, to catch pigeons, and if things escalate, seagulls. So what? Yes, under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 it’s illegal to kill, injure or take any wild bird, but this was drawn up to stop people stealing ospreys and ptarmigans.

  Let’s not forget, shall we, that Ken Livingstone, darling of the left and therefore an RSPB poster boy, ejected all the people selling grain to tourists in the pigeon-infested Trafalgar Square and when Wilbur and Myrtle continued to show up with birdseed they’d bought from a Chelsea ladies’ health food shop he introduced a Harris hawk to the area. Which is the Messerschmitt of the skies.

  He’d be the first to say that homeless people should be encouraged to eat pigeons, and I’d go further. Right now, the hedgerows on my farm are teeming with succulent blackberries and the few trees that haven’t been ruined by deer and squirrels are laden with all kinds of delicious fruit.

  If a homeless person were to spend a day in the woods with some Rambo traps and a bit of cunning, he would end up with a feast that even Henry VIII would call ‘a bit extravagant’.

  The problem is, if he killed a deer for some venison and a squirrel for seasoning, he’d have the whole country calling for his blood. And that’s ridiculous. We need to lose our dewy-eyed Disney sentimentality and accept that homeless people eating pigeons they’ve caught is better for them, better for our windowsills and better for the coffers at the NHS than encouraging them instead to eat takeaway pizza and Double Decker chocolate bars they’ve half-inched from the local corner shop.

  17 September 2017

  Some terrace chants are mean, but Manchester United fans are just bigging up their new hero

  This year Manchester United signed a footballer called Romelu Lukaku. And it seems he’s been doing very well, scoring so many goals that adoring fans sing songs in the stands about the magnitude of his member. However, they’ve now been asked to stop doing this by anti-racist campaigners, who say that it’s racial stereotyping.

  I was a bit confused about this, because Mr Lukaku is Belgian and I was unaware that Belgians are notorious for having oversized genitals.

  Undeterred, the do-gooders go on to point out that any racist chant that is threatening, abusive or insulting to a person is against the law.

  And again I’m confused, because never in all human history has a man felt abused, threatened or insulted by someone saying, ‘My word, old chap, that’s one hell of a sausage you’ve got down there.’

  I can’t speak for Mr Lukaku, who has urged supporters to ‘move on’ and #RespectEachOther, but I can tell you that if I were at work and 80,000 people were singing loudly about how my penis was two foot long, I’d feel pretty damn good.

  There was a time when racism in football was monstrous. People would turn up at games with sackfuls of bananas that they would throw at black players, and the chants would boggle the mind of anyone born after 1990. But by and large it’s gone now. It’s not so much ‘kick’ racism out of football as ‘keep’ racism out of football.

  I’m a season-ticket holder at Chelsea, and every other weekend Stamford Bridge is like a super-condensed rainbow nation. The pitch is full of people from all over the world, and the stands are crammed with every conceivable skin tone: black, brown, white and even orange when we are playing Manchester City and half of Cheshire is in town.

  And yet there are signs everywhere urging us to say no to racism. Which is a bit like having a sign in Tatler’s office urging staff to say no to state-school kids. It’s stupid. I never think, ‘Oh, no. Don’t pass the ball to Eden Hazard. He’s Belgian and he’ll trip over his organ.’ I just see eleven men in Chelsea colours. So does everyone else, as far as I can tell.

  Last week we played Nottingham Forest, and their supporters suddenly started to sing, to the tune of ‘Guantanamera’, ‘You’re a shit, Jimmy Savile.’ I turned to my son, who is an expert on football crowd mentality, and asked who they were singing about.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a Chelsea supporter who’s come to the game with his grandson.’

  Before I’d even had time to pull the appropriate face, they’d changed tack and were singing, ‘You’re on the register.’

  Imagine that. You save up all month to take your grandson to watch his beloved Chelsea team play football. You pull on a tracksuit to keep out the autumnal chill, and maybe you tousle the lad’s hair after your team has scored one of its goals. And what do you get in return? Several thousand people pointing at you and calling you a paedophile. And that’s somehow fine.

  All of which brings me naturally to a tapestry that is held in the vaults of a museum in Bristol. More than 250 big-hearted volunteers took about twenty years to complete this remarkable 267-foot work. Prince Charles put in the final stitch in 2000.

  Called the New World Tapestry, it was created to commemorate Britain’s colonial exploits between 1583 and 1642. Many were hoping it would be put on display in a few years to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage.

  But that now seems unlikely, because a Native American lady has decided that one of the scenes in the tapestry, which shows local people laughing as they set fire to white settlers, is racist.

  The principal artist, Tom Mor, described these accusations as ‘rubbish’, saying, ‘It’s reality – we slaughtered the Native Americans and they slaughtered us.’

  I fear, however, that this argument will fall on deaf ears, because it’s a fact that we stole their land and gave them nothing in return, apart from medicine, food, electricity, phones and Las Vegas. Anyone who says otherwise is a racist. And, yes, that would include John Wayne and anyone else who starred in a cowboy film.

  It’s the same with Horatio Nelson. I couldn’t follow the story closely because my eyes had rolled into the top of my head in despair, but someone apparently said the admiral was a racist too and that he should be removed from Trafalgar Square.

  Meanwhile, in Canada, the image of William Lyon Mackenzie King is to be removed from the $50 banknote. He was the country’s longest-serving prime minister and by the standards of the early twentieth century he was extremely liberal, but his diaries reveal that he used contemporary racial epithets, so that is that. He will be replaced with another former prime minister.

  It is entirely possible that the anti-slavery campaigners Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce also used words that would be deemed inappropriate today, so what should we do about that? Tear down the statues erected in their honour? Strip naked and burn effigies of them in the streets?

  Actually, don’t answer that.

  24 September 2017

  Terrorists have put half the world out of bounds, and bedbugs patrol the rest of it

  With a new super-strain of drug-resistant malaria rampaging through Southeast Asia, various Notting Hill people called Arabella are having to think twice about taking their holidays next year in Cambodia.

  This is causing them all sorts of grief, because obviously they can’t go to the Middle East either – that’s where footballers go to get papped for either wearing or not wearing a wedding ring – and North Africa is out because, although the beaches are swept quite often, it’s usually with machine-gun fire.

  North America? Nope, because who’s to say that by next summer Mr Kim won’t have turned the entire continent into the sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland you thought only existed in Hollywood’s box of CGI tricks? And South America is a no-no as well because, in all the ways that matter to Arabella, it’s just the same as Notting Hill. And that’s before we get to the Caribbean, which so far as I can tell isn’t there any more.

  The world is all a big worry at the moment,
but the truth is that if you come back from your holidays with a bullet hole in your arm or without one of your ears because you were kidnapped while trying to score a gram of coke in Bolivia, you do at least have a dinner party anecdote.

  And you really shouldn’t worry about malaria either, because, as I’ve said before, the only Westerners who catch it are those with orange faces who need to explain to the Daily Mail why they have a sniffly nose and mad eyes, so they get their spokesman to say they caught, er, malaria while digging a well for villagers in Rwanda.

  I’ve travelled the world quite a lot, and only once did I catch something unpleasant. I’d been in Cuba filming for a couple of weeks, and a few days after I got back I was lying in bed wondering why I seemed to have so many new freckles on my arm. On both arms in fact. And my legs. And between them.

  I had a bit of a poke about, squeezing one of them to see if it was perhaps cancer, and immediately I wished it had been, because the skin broke and out popped what can only be described as an animal of some kind. A spider? A crab? An alien? It was hard to be sure because it ran off before I’d had a chance to examine it more closely.

  What I did examine was the next freckle along and, sure enough, when I squeezed that, another animal leapt out and scuttled away. And I had hundreds of freckles. Maybe even a thousand.

  I went to see the doctor, who asked if I was feeling ill. I was. Lousy, in fact. ‘Well, that’s not surprising,’ she said, lifting her head from my nether regions and turning off her Davy lamp, ‘because you have lice. That’s where the word “lousy” comes from.’

  Now, I’m sorry, but coming back from an exotic foreign trip with an exotic foreign disease is quite cool, but coming back from Cuba in the 1990s, when pretty much every single woman under the age of thirty is basically a prostitute, that’s not cool at all. ‘That’s disgusting,’ said all my friends.