Clarkson's Sunday Times Columns

Not to mention all this Feminism is a Godsend for the pre-made sandwich industry!
 
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Ancient history this week:

Orgreave was just a miner skirmish. End of inquiry (Nov. 6)

When you examine the people in Theresa May's government, it rather looks as though the country is now being run by the Carshalton Golf Club's steering committee. They're all so provincial and dreary.

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, however, is obviously an exception, because much to everyone's surprise she stood up last week and said there would be no inquiry into the behaviour of the South Yorkshire police during the miners' strike 32 years ago.

It'd be hard, really, for them to get a fair hearing. Because they've just emerged blinking into the light after the Hillsborough thing, and then there's this Rotherham grooming business, and that's before we get to the televised raid on the home of Cliff Richard.

I suspect that if you called the South Yorkshire police today to say that you'd been murdered, you'd get a recorded message saying: "All our officers are being investigated at the moment. Please call back later." The last thing they need, then, is to be asked about what happened on a June day back in 1984. And it's the last thing we need too, because I can sum it up for you here in this small corner of the newspaper.

I'm born-and-bred South Yorkshire. Every single one of my ancestors back to the middle of the 18th century was born, married and buried within 12 miles of one another in Doncaster. My grandfather wrote a book about the mining industry. My great-grandfather worked down the pit. He was even called--and I'm not making this up--Doug Hole. So I did have some sympathy for the miners during that strike in 1984.

Unlike any other industry, with the possible exception of farming, mining was a way of life. The pit wasn't just where you worked. You lived in a house that belonged to the Coal Board, and everyone you knew was in the same boat. So if the pit shut, you didn't just lose your job; you lost everything.

However, while the individuals had my sympathy, the people who went round pretending to represent their interests did not. There was Arthur Scargill, obviously, and his weird sidekicks, the lifelong communist Mick McGahey and Maurice Jones, the editor of the Miner newspaper, a man who'd spent a bit of time in East Germany and once wrote my name down in a book that was full of scores he had to settle when he and his pals seized power.

Together they ran the strike, and all of them made many impassioned speeches about how they were representing the little man in the face of Thatcherite aggression. They were of course doing no such thing. They wanted Britain to become part of the Soviet Union, and the miners were being used as their pawns. They were to Scargill what the Tommies in the trenches had been to Earl Haig: Cannon fodder.

Which brings us to the coking plant at Orgreave. In the battle with Margaret Thatcher--who was also in Mr Jones's book--it was seen as the Mohne dam, a vital strategic facility that must be destroyed, and in the Wolf's Lair Scargill drew up plans to send in an army of 5,000 pickets to shut it down.

This tactic had worked well in the 1970s miners' strikes, when a large army had overwhelmed the police lines in Birmingham and ultimately brought down Edward Heath's government.

But this time the police were ready. In Birmingham they had deployed about 800 officers, who'd had to use pilfered dustbin lids to protect themselves. At Orgreave they had 6,000 many in riot gear backed up by horses and dogs.

There hadn't been a scene such as this on British soil since medieval times. Two armies facing each other across a field, waiting for the order to charge.

It's hard to say who fired the first shots. At the time the BBC said it was the miners and ITV said it was the police. Doubtless, an inquiry would have spent a lot of time and many millions of pounds establishing this, but what would be the point? Because it'd ignore one simple fact: both sides wanted a fight.

Many of the policemanists had been brought up from London and were very much looking forward to kicking a northerner's head in. They had even been paid overtime, and many waved their engorged payslips at the miners, in the way Chelsea fans sometimes wave wads of cash at Liverpool supporters when the two sides meet to play football.

Is that the sort of behaviour you want to see from the police? No, of course not, but it was a lovely day, and bashing a Sheffield Wednesday supporter over the head with a truncheon beat sitting in a station in Pimlico filling in forms. Plus, although I'm sure none of them saw it this way, they really were defending the British way of life. If you squint a bit, they could be likened to our brave boys in their Spitfires in the summer of 1940.

The miners would not have shared this view. Because they didn't really understand at the time what Scargill was up to, they thought they were fighting for their jobs and houses and families.

But let's not get carried away. They were out and about, surrounded by their mates, in the sunshine, and I don't doubt for a second that many were looking forward to kicking a London policeman in the testicles. So. Both sides wanted a punch-up. And both believed, with some justification, they had right on their side.

We are led to believe that what followed was a horrific battle with cavalry charges and missile attacks, but the truth is no one was killed. No one had life-threatening injuries. And all 95 people charged with various offences were set free when the trials collapsed. Many even got a bit of compensation.

What's more, the British way of life prevailed, Scargill was dishonourably discharged and all the other trade unionists became environmentalists and health and safety officers, roles in which they can continue to be a nuisance.

That's why Rudd is right to say no inquiry is needed into Orgreave. It was just a scrap. No harm done. Move on.
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On the election shit show:

Pipe down and come with me on a tour of Trump's Britain (Nov. 13)

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 Biblethumping 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 bear? 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 hacking 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 were to meet him, I'd dislike him on a cellular level. However, he maintained throughout that politicians had let the poor down. Ker-ching. 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 No 10.

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.
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I like it. He's saying what I've heard a lot of people say. The regulars are sick of being lied to and figure this might be the change we need.
 
I know Britons can't understand this, but Trump lost the popular vote. He won by the electoral college, which is how we elect the president. Also worthy of note, our founding fathers didn't believe that the masses were truly able to select their leaders. Who is able to vote in the United States has changed greatly over the years.

Edit: Here are a couple of things that can help to explain this from an American perspective, the first of which I borrowed from a friend's Facebook post.

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

 
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Don't believe what the media tells you to think.
 
Except he doesn't act like he depends on the job and will regurgitate anything thrown his way.
 
Jail time:

HMP Whipsnade is now open. Don't feed the jailbirds (Nov. 20)

Many of Britain's prison warders walked out last week. And almost immediately the High Court explained that because it's illegal for them to go on strike, they could be incarcerated in their own jails if they didn't go back to work. So they walked straight back in again.

Ever since, they've been telling everyone who will listen that it's horrid to work in a prison. I'm sorry, but that's not going to whip up much public sympathy because we've all seen The Shawshank Redemption so we know what goes on in there. It's just lots of genial old blokes sitting around whittling chess pieces and playing with marbles.

Only last week in fact we were shown pictures from inside a modern-day prison of various healthy-looking young men watching The X Factor while eating fish and chips. And this view is backed up from time to time by grainy long-lens shots of people such as Jeffrey Archer popping out for lunch at Pizza Express and tending the prison vegetable garden at weekends. So it's hard not to tut when the prison warders point out that Porridge was a sitcom, not a documentary.

However, I've done a bit of digging and it really does seem that life for the warders in a modern prison is pretty terrible. They are routinely stabbed and beaten up and it's by no means unusual for inmates to empty lavatory buckets over their heads. I wouldn't like that very much.

And apparently things are getting worse by the day because the current drug of choice for the inmates is something called "spice", which is a sort of synthetic cannabis. But unlike real cannabis, which makes the user feel a bit giggly and then rather peckish, Spice seems to make them want to break a chair over someone's head.

And I can't really think of any other job where an ordinary person is made to share a building all day with thousands of people who want to hit him over the head with a chair and them empty a bucket of faeces on to his prone body.

Soldiers are asked to confront people who want to kill them. Policemen too. But in such situations they are given guns and hand grenades and air support. All Mr Mackay gets is a high-visibility jacket.

And what use is one of those when the prisoners are using drones to deliver the knives and the mobile phones that are necessary for doing internet banking deals to buy the spice? They need ground-to-air missiles to stop that kind of thing.

The obvious solution is to get tough, to put a prisoner in a cell for his entire sentence, explaining that he can only eat what he can catch and that if he's thirsty he should suck moisture from the moss on the walls. Any dissent at all will cause him to be put in an Alec Guinness box for a few weeks.

If a politician were to suggest this, I feel sure that in the days of Brexit and Donald Trump it would go down very well with the voters and he'd be swept to power. But then Twitter would be hijacked by a million bleeding-heart liberals explaining that prisoners are human beings and that they should not be made to live on a diet of woodlice and moss.

As I have said before, I favour community punishments. I like the idea of convicts being made to clean up litter at the side of a motorway and tend the pansies on municipal roundabouts. Certainly it would be amusing to throw fruit and bricks at them as we drove by.

But this sort of thing will provoke howls of protest from what we must call "ordinary hard-working British families", who will sense that we are being soft on crime.

Which means we have to have the system we have now and that doesn't work either. Because Johnny Prison Guard is being stabbed and has to go home every night with a barnet full of excrement and a chair leg sticking out of his eye.

So is it possible, I wonder, to introduce a system whereby the prisoners are in one part of the jail and the guards are in another, watching what's going on through closed-circuit television? Orders could be issued over loudspeakers, food could be delivered through hatches and rules enforced with a sprinkler system. Maybe the sprinklers could be hooked up in some way to the urinals.

Obviously this would be expensive, but happily I have an idea that addresses that. Turn the prisons into zoos.

We are perfectly happy to spend money to look round an actual zoo, even though the animals are invariably asleep or in the surgery being subjected to medical experiments. You're expecting Planet Earth and what you get is a plant room.

Surely it would be much more enjoyable to look round a prison. The inmates could be in glass cages with a little plaque on the outside telling us what they're in for and how long they'll be staying. Maybe they could all be put into groups, with the robbers in one wing and the murderers in another.

Naturally it would be educational for children, so perhaps there could be school trips. And, best of all, you might be able to see the man who stole your television. It'd be fun to stand on the other side of the glass, pointing at him and laughing.

At present you only get a scrap of paper from the police when you report a crime. It offers you counselling and gives you a crime number for insurance purposes. You never know if they find the man who nicked your car or pushed you onto the Tube train rails. My idea of turning prisons into zoos would allow you to find out and to watch him mooching about in a small glass room like a panda.

This way, the prisoners are treated humanely like animals, the guards stop being beaten up, and the jails become self-funding. Sometimes I wonder why I waste my life driving cars round corners while shouting.
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Genius. :lol:
 
The new column is related to The Grand Tour:

Jen's sex toys have nothing on my interview clangers (Nov. 27)

The really rather lovely Jennifer Aniston made an appearance on the always insightful programme The One Show last week and you probably thought: "That's not such a bad way of earning a living. You come to London at someone else's expense to talk for a couple of minutes about your new film or underwear or scent, or whatever it is you're promoting, you make a joke about sex toys and then you go for dinner at an agreeable restaurant."

Well, I can assure you it's not like that, because I've spent the past month on the promotional trail, and it's a brutal cocktail of complicated hotel rooms, shouty airport security staff and indigestion from gobbled dinners, all topped off with a never-ending array of mostly idiotic interviews.

On Tuesday morning, or it may have been Wednesday, I landed with my colleagues in New York, or possibly Chicago, to talk on the phone with a man from ESPN, or it could have been the Wisconsin Advertiser, about our new show on Amazon Prime.

Unfortunately, the location chosen for this important interview was the mezzanine floor of a very noisy hotel. And because the three of us had to talk to him at the same time, we had to put the phone on speaker. And it was a bad line.

And I have the same hearing problems as a 1970s rock star.

At first I thought James May and Richard Hammond were talking to each other, but then I realised the interview had begun and leant forwards so I could hear more clearly. It was hopeless; it was like listening to Radio Caroline. I'd have had a better clue of what he was on about if he'd used Morse code.

Eventually we moved to the hotel's business centre, which was much quieter, but only because of the frosty stares from the businesswoman in there, who plainly couldn't understand why three extremely scruffy and fat middle-aged strangers were talking loudly about themselves over the phone to a man who was clearly on a trawler in the North Sea.

Afterwards we did another phone interview in the car, with a very giggly young woman who said that her sister liked James's hair. She didn't have any actual questions about it, or anything else for that matter.

So that was a bit awkward, but there was no time to dwell on it because Hammond had to be interviewed by Fox News; we told him it had been extremely anti-Trump in the election and to make as many anti-Donald remarks as possible. I, meanwhile, had an appointment across town with CNN, and then a website, and then another website.

And then there was a mad dash to get to a big office, where, fed up with answering the same questions, I started out by saying: "If you ask me to name my favourite car, I'm going to stab you in the eye with my Biro."

"So," the interviewer said cheerily. "What's your favourite car?" At lunch there's only time for one course and you have to eat it like you're a Henry the hoover. I wanted a glass of rose, but the restaurant only sold it by the bottle, so, much to the horror of my PR minder, I ordered one of those.

May, who hates being interviewed even more than I do, went for a bottle of heavy red, and Hammond a giant gin and tonic. We then popped outside for a cigarette, and when we got back the minder had polished off the lot. She may not have looked it as she tottered down the street to the next interview, but she's very professional.

Or bitter. Because when the interview trail had begun in Los Angeles--or was it San Francisco?--several weeks earlier, Hammond had filled himself so full of gin he'd had to be locked in his hotel room.

May and I, meanwhile, had to spend a whole day in a darkened closet, being interviewed by a conveyor belt of hacks who came and went on a schedule dreamt up by someone from California who therefore doesn't smoke and who consequently doesn't realise how difficult it is to be sensible when you're forced to breathe nothing but air.

We tried at lunchtime to find somewhere to have a crafty fag, but as the nearest smoking area was in Tokyo, we gave up and went back to saying "Lexus LFA" a few more hundred times.

Then I was on The Jonathan Ross Show, where I seem to remember twerking with a young lady; then I saw Steve Wright on Radio 2; and then I was in Germany being torn to shreds by a very angry nine-year-old journalist who turned up with a tape recorder but didn't turn it on because she was too busy telling me that cars are killing the polar bear. I don't think I said one word to her in the whole interview.

After a few more Germans had asked me to name my favourite car, it was off to America again. I remember almost none of it, except that the young woman from Men's Journal was very pretty.

What's extraordinary is that after these fleeting encounters, I read all about myself in their papers and on their websites and I thought: "Hmmm. You spend your whole life living with yourself and every Thursday afternoon in a psychiatrist's chair and you still haven't a clue who you are. So how can a hack work it out in a 20-minute interview?" Especially when I'd decided after the 34th interview to start lying. I told one chap that I used to be a proctologist and another that I had two world records for knitting. The pretty interviewer from Men's Journal? I just told her what I thought she'd like to hear. "Ed Miliband? Yup. I loved him."

When one earnest young man asked me what the three of us were doing in New York, I told him that I was a guest on James and Richard's honeymoon. He wrote that down in his notebook.

Aniston was soundly criticised for talking about sex toys, on the BBC, before the watershed, but she wouldn't have known what time it was or even what country she was in. Or she could have been bored. Or lying. I don't blame her.
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I haven't kept up with many the interviews Clarkson's been doing--can anyone recommend the better ones?
 
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Smoke if you got 'em:

Everyone's dodging the ban, so let's just stub out smoking (Dec. 4)

When smoking was banned in a number of states in America, everyone was extremely enthusiastic about their bright'n'fresh future. Shortly after one state ban came into force, a woman stumbled over a quarter of a mile of tussocky grass on a beach in California to tell me to put my cigarette out, and was genuinely incredulous when I simply ignored her.

Nearly as incredulous, in fact, as I was when I learnt later that smoking on some California beaches was indeed banned.

Later, in Arizona, I was told that I would not be allowed into a police station where I was filming because the body scanner had revealed that I had smoking materials about my person. I was made to go outside and leave them in my car.

And then I was told that because my car now contained the smoking materials, it would have to be moved out of the station's car park and onto the street. Where it would have to be parked at least 20ft away from the door of any federal building.

The Americans went berserk with their new laws, and so did the Australians. There's one tiny spot, halfway between Darwin and Alice Springs, where you can enjoy a crafty fag. But everywhere else? Not a chance.

The French had a rather different attitude when their government introduced a ban. They just ignored it. The day it became law, I was actually in Lyons, in a restaurant, and I asked the owner what he would do if his ashtrays were confiscated. I'm not fluent in the language but I know enough to understand what he said: "I would blockade the autoroute and burn some sheep until the president came to his senses." This is the French way. And the Spanish way. And even the German way.

Which brings me on to Britain. It's been nearly 10 years since smoking was banned in public places in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And yet still you get a little sticker in the window of a pub or a restaurant telling you that lighting up is illegal.

Why? It's also against the law to stab someone on the premises, or to run about firing a machinegun, or to make love to your girlfriend, but there are no signs saying you can't do that. Only smoking is singled out.

I have a farm and was told last week by a government agency that unless I affix a "No smoking" sign to the barn wall I will be prosecuted. So here's a message to all the local kids who drop round to break windows and slash the fertiliser bags when I'm out. That's fine. So long as you don't smoke. Oh, and do feel free to fall out of a tree, because if you do, I'll be prosecuted for that as well.

It's all bonkers, obviously, but I've started to notice something recently. Just as Britain begins to shift away from Europe politically, we've started to adopt a rather more European attitude to rules that are actually nigh-on impossible to enforce.

In the beginning a restaurant's designated smoking area was a windy and wet bus shelter. But not any more. The other night I went to a restaurant's smoking terrace for a quick intercoursal breather and couldn't help noticing it was fully enclosed and heated. So I finished my dinner out there, along with everyone else.

There's a club I visit sometimes that has a room and it really is a room with fireplaces and bookcases and comfy chairs. But by carefully examining the actual rules on smoking, and then bending them, the management has ensured it looks like a Marlboro convention in there.

Some people don't even bother bending the rules. I went out for dinner a couple of weeks ago and at 11pm the waiter simply plonked an ashtray on my table. That's happened twice since. And only last weekend, in a pub, the manager pulled up a chair and we all had an enjoyable indoor smoking moment with our post-lunch coffees.

Soon, I suspect, smoking when you're out will become like foxhunting or driving at 90mph on the motorway. Something everyone just does, and the police won't bother lifting a finger because they're too busy not investigating burglaries.

You may remember last year that the government suddenly announced that it was illegal to smoke in a car that contained children. And how many people do you suppose have been prosecuted for this so far? Yes, you're dead right. It's one.

On a personal level I'm delighted to see the breakdown of law and order on this front. I dislike very much being forced to get up from the table and go outside when I want a cigarette. Also, I was watching a friend's daughter sing her raspy, sexy, bluesy jazz stuff in a club the other night and it felt wrong for the air to be full of nothing but air.

However, there's no getting round the fact that in Britain most people not only don't smoke but don't like it when others do. I get that. Smoking is like rambling, or caravanning, or bell-ringing. The practitioner is having a nice time, yes, but he or she is making everyone else's life unpleasant. And that's just not on.

Actually, it's more like farting, which I dislike intensely. I do not find it funny or interesting. And I would be horrified if the person next to me at dinner spent the entire evening on one cheek as they let yet another one go. If they are in some discomfort they should get up and go to the lavatory to sort themselves out.

So what's to be done? Well, since the smoking ban is disintegrating before our very eyes, and things will just get worse, haven't we arrived at the point where the sale of cigarettes should just be outlawed? We smokers and various newsagents would roar with indignation, of course, and a few of the French people who live here now might burn some sheep on a motorway to protest, but six months down the line let's face it we'd all be pretty grateful.
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Time for politics:

We must be mad to elect someone as normal as us (Dec. 11)

There's a lot not to understand about Italy. Its Saturday night television game shows, its ability to be very modern and extremely old-fashioned at the same time, its economy, Fiat and, at the top of the list, its political system. Last week, for an example, they had some kind of referendum where voters were asked to choose between the prime minister and a 1970s light entertainment star. And, weirdly, their version of Richard O'Sullivan seems to have won it.

That doesn't actually mean he will become the new leader but the prime minister has resigned and now there's even more chaos and rushing about than usual.

Meanwhile, in Austria, which is a lot easier to comprehend, there was a simple two-cornered presidential election between Hitler and Brian May out of Queen. By a slender margin the badger enthusiast won, and now all of the world's liberals are wandering around, scratching their heads, wondering what on earth is going on.

A television star with nylon hair is set to become president of America, Britain has voted to leave the EU, Italy has been toppled by Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served? and Austria has gone all lovey-dovey.

I wrote a few weeks ago about why this is happening. It's simple. Political leaders always say they will make things better and when they achieve office it turns out that all they really want to do is legalise gay marriage and save the polar bear and install transgender traffic lights.

Which is very lovely, of course, if you are a lesbian or a transgenderist or a polar bear, but of no consequence at all if you have five kids and you are struggling to make ends meet on a grotty little council estate.

You want a job. You want your pub back. You want less wailing from the local mosque. You want to smoke at the chippy. You want to be able to tell racist jokes without looking over your shoulder first. And you miss Woolworths.

You have seen John Major and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and David Cameron come and go and your life just keeps getting steadily worse. And you keep thinking: "Why can't we have an ordinary person in No 10, a person who thinks like I do and speaks my language?" And then along comes Nigel Farage with his pint tankard and his tabs and the rest is history.

This is what's happened in America and Italy as well. Millions have decided that they want to vote for a normal person, someone they can relate to. And, I'm sorry, but I find one of my eyebrows has raised slightly as I mutter a questioning "hmmm" under my breath.

Let's take my plumber as a good example. He's a decent, down-to-earth chap who works hard, pays his taxes and would, in the mind of the world's voters these days, make a very good political leader. But he wouldn't. In the same way that Theresa May wouldn't be able to fix a leaky cistern.

I've often joked that a government's job is to erect park benches and that's it, but the truth is that it's got to worry about foreign policy, Vladimir Putin's ambitions in the Baltic states, complex economic shifts in the Far East, Isis, the funding of the NHS, which is bigger than the Chinese army, the Chinese army and article 50 and you've still got to know the name of South Korea's president when you're doorstepped by a jumped-up reporter first thing on a Tuesday morning. This would be extremely difficult if your only qualification is an NVQ diploma in domestic heating.

There's no question that the people who stood for the leadership of Ukip after Farage had resigned for the 12th time were down-to-earth and normal.

One, a former soldier called John Rees-Evans, was on record as saying a homosexual donkey had tried to rape his horse. This caused all sorts of problems for the liberal elite but it's actually the kind of thing you hear in pubs and barracks every day.

He also admitted he'd taken a handgun on a shopping trip to Ikea. But then said this happened in Bulgaria where he has a home. I'll be honest. That's not so normal.

But it is normal to have episodes in your past that are best left undisturbed. Which brings us on to another Ukip candidate, barrister Steven Woolfe. He forgot, quite understandably, to mention that he had a conviction for drink driving and then was excluded from the race because he submitted his application 17 minutes late. How human is that? The eventual winner was someone called Diane James who resigned 18 days later because someone was horrid to her on a train station platform. And the second contest was won by a former history lecturer, Paul Normal. It was claimed that he'd played football for Tranmere Rovers and then it turned out that all he'd done was drive past the ground, and that's OK, too.

Everyone tells porkies to make themselves look more interesting. I once told a girl my dad was a member of the Norwegian royal family.

In fact I was once touted as a suitable prime minister. Many people signed a petition, thinking that I'd be good at the job because I'm down-to-earth and grounded and speak my mind. And because I'd seen the inside of police cells in both France and Greece for being drunk, which is fine. Because we've all done that.

Yes, and we've all broken the speed limit and played tonsil hockey with the wrong partner and smoked the wrong kind of leaf and nicked sweets and looked at pornography and fiddled our expenses.

This is what makes us normal. And it's precisely because we are normal, we cannot be politicians. Politicians need to have no skeletons in their cupboards and hard drives that are no more soiled than a My Little Pony book. They need to have pink lungs and monogamous genitals and clear heads, because if they don't, they will be driven, by the public, into the wilderness.

Politicians, in short, have to be weird. And I only hope the world comes to its senses and realises that before every country on earth is taken over by plumbers and self-made businessmen and Terry the chef from Fawlty Towers.
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The chief reason why things keep going in the same direction no matter which party is voted in is that the people behind the scenes see to it that the choices are either Globalist A or Globalist B, so whichever gets voted in that agenda will be followed. Only seldom does this not happen. 'Normal' people are usually filtered out in the pre-selection process. Jeremy needs to stop relying on the 'official' news from the MSM and start researching whether the 'fake news' is really as fake as we are told.
 
Elijah B. said:
Jeremy needs to stop relying on the 'official' news from the MSM and start researching whether the 'fake news' is really as fake as we are told.
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My impression is that fake news largely involves twisting stories found in the MSM to conform to the confirmation biases of the target audience. Globalism isn't going away anytime soon, unless capitalism goes first. The challenge is to find a way to adapt to it by finding livelihoods for those left unemployed by automation and outsourcing. Nativist poltics might appeal to the emotions of the most aggrieved voters, but it will likely do little to solve their problems.
 
This week's column is personal:

O Adrian, who will make me laugh now? (Dec. 18)

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 onto the bar, turned the television off and then ran out again. Welcome, everyone, to the man who would become my closest friend: AA 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 38 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 onto 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 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 20ft so he could embrace someone coming the other way. In every restaurant it would take him 20 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.

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 box set on the television.

"Ooh," said Jimmy. "That's a bit ambitious -- it's a 10-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.
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Ringing in the New Year:

For a healthier, happier you, just live like it's 1617 (Jan. 01)

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.

So allow me to suggest a new resolution. A resolution that is easy to do, and that will cause you to live a longer and happier and more interesting life. Get rid of all your stuff.

We shall start -- as you did a few minutes ago -- with your coffee machine. It drives you mad, doesn't it, because every time you ask it to do what it was designed to do, it says that it needs water, or beans, or some kind of decalcifying procedure, which means you have to spend the next half an hour shouting at your family because the instruction book isn't in the drawer where instruction books are supposed to be kept. And when you do find it, it's full of badly drawn diagrams that make no sense.

Of course you may have a much simpler Nespresso machine that produces delicious coffee without much palaver at all. Yes, but is there anything on God's green earth that generates so much unnecessary waste? One day we will all drown in discarded Clooney capsules.

And have you tried to buy replacements? You are asked if you have an account with Nespresso, by which it means a facility that allows it to sell your personal details to other luxury good suppliers. And if you do, you can simply put your purchases on account, which takes exactly five minutes longer than paying by credit card.

So if you want a happy and less stressful life in 2017, put your coffee machine in the bin and go back to a kettle. And then throw your wi-fi equipment away as well.

Think about it. No more rummaging around in a cupboard you can't quite reach, trying to read the microdot on the back of the box that is your code. No more turning it off and then on again. No more frustration when the film you've selected starts to freeze. No more children glued to their phones throughout every meal.

Naturally you will also be cut off from the world, but is that such a bad thing? I had a very happy Christmas precisely because without a functioning wi-fi I was blissfully unaware that every single celebrity in the world had died.

Next, you should throw away everything that needs a charger. Because imagine that. Going on holiday with a suitcase full of books and clothes rather than wires.

And do you need two cars? Yes. Definitely. There was that time in June when you had to be at your parents and your wife or husband had to take the kids to Alton Towers. You couldn't have done that with just one set of wheels in the drive. But for the rest of the time they are just sitting outside, depreciating, costing a fortune in insurance and developing faults.

It's the same story with your complicated driverless lawnmower and your octopus pool cleaner and your motorised pepper grinder. You imagined that such things would make your life easier, but instead you have to spend every spare moment shouting at them because they've gone wrong.

As you may have heard, I recently lost a bet with my colleagues on the television show we make, and as a result they blew up my house. This meant I had to get planning permission to build a new one, and on paper it all looks jolly enormous.

However, because it will take three or four years to finish, I've renovated a very small cottage and moved into that. It's so small I can run a bath with one hand and clean the Aga with the other. And I'm sitting here now, with my laptop wedged between the dishwasher and the woodburning stove, thinking: "Why did I buy a dishwasher?" And more importantly: "Why do I need anything bigger or more complicated than this?" The water comes -- quite slowly, I admit -- from the stream at the bottom of the garden, I'm warmed by logs I forage from the woods, there are no dimmer switches to break and no loos that shoot jets of water into my bottom and if I want to close the curtains I'll have to buy some first. At the moment, I have gaffer-taped blankets over the windows, and that seems to work fine.

The furniture -- and there isn't much -- was scavenged from my mother's lockup, and I must confess it's quite nice sitting here, surrounded by memories from my childhood, knowing that because it was all made from wood by warty peasants in the 17th century none of it will ever snap.

In fact, up here in the sticks I have only two pieces of 21st-century engineering: a Range Rover, which has broken down, and a quad bike, which has also broken down, mainly because some kids from the village filled the petrol tank with what I hope is water but which I fear, having siphoned it out, was more likely to have been urine. Because that's what I'd have done.

This means that if I want to go to the village for supplies, I must walk. And as I am allergic to this kind of thing I went outside the back door this morning with my gun and shot a partridge. Tonight it will be supper. Along with some vegetables that I bought before Christmas at Daylesford with the Pounds 215 I've now saved by eschewing all form of modern living.

Later this week, of course, I shall have to go back to London, to my hi-tech flat, where I shall spend a few days trying to turn the thermostatically controlled windows off. It'll be the sad end of my new year's resolution to spend the rest of my life in the 17th century.

Although, as I near the end of this column, I realise that my trip back to the misery of modern living may have to begin a bit sooner. Because if I print this out and put it in the post, it won't arrive at The Sunday Times until Tuesday. Damn.
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