Clarkson was away for a while (filming the second series of the Grand Tour?) but is now back, if not quite focused:
If Farron really wants votes, he must deal with our most grievous malaise: culottes (May 21)
So if Labour wins the general election, Jeremy Corbyn will reintroduce the Deltic railway locomotive, put Mungo Jerry back in the charts and make rich people in the south buy everyone in the north of England a brazier so they can be warm when they are picketing someone else's place of work.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat, who is called Timmy, says that if he wins a Commons majority he will lower the voting age to six and take us out of Europe by not taking us out at all.
This has annoyed the Green Party, which thought of these things first, so it's gone further by saying that if it wins 325 more seats than it got last time around, it will increase the number of bottle banks, issue free tampons to the poor and make prostitutes cheaper.
That leaves us with the strong and stable Conservative Party, which may look as though it's being run by the steering committee from Carshalton golf club but says that despite appearances it will provide strong and stable leadership to create a strong and stable country where the strong are stable and the stable are strong.
Don't you find all this a bit depressing? I mean, here they all are, all these parties, with the chance to say and promise whatever they like. And all they can come up with is more bottle banks and something about British Rail.
Seriously. Is that the limit of their imagination? What we want is someone with vision. Someone who really does want to make life better for as many people as possible. Someone who understands that the most important thing facing the nation right now is not the NHS or Brexit but the average-speed camera.
That's what we want to hear from a party. "If we are elected, we will immediately remove all speed cameras. And restrict bicycles to children's playgrounds, which is where they belong. Oh, and women will no longer be allowed to wear culottes." That would get our attention.
And how quickly would you vote for someone who said they'd introduce profiling at airport security so that people who are very obviously not terrorists ? because, for example, they are very obviously Andrew Lloyd Webber ? would be allowed to board the aircraft without being irradiated and sexually molested first? If you are standing for election, you have a clean piece of paper. You can fling whatever you like into the mix and see if it sticks. So why not say you will introduce the death penalty for people who drop litter? Maybe people would be appalled by that, in which case you'd lose. But maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they'd like to see the carcass of a fly-tipper hanging upside down from a lamppost. I know I would.
I think it'd also be a good idea to imprison anyone who's called the Jeremy Vine show, or written something on Mail Online's message boards. And while we are on the subject of prison, why not say that inmates will be locked up in an unheated cell and will only be able to survive if they become adept at sucking moisture from the moss on the walls? I'm on a roll now. So how about preventing newsreaders from saying, "The following report contains flash photography"? We know already. And freeing advertisers from the need to employ a shorthand speaker who has to read out the terms and conditions and caveats and complex financial implications extremely quickly at the end of every radio commercial? Gillette would be forced to stop selling razors in packaging so robust that you need dynamite to get through it; newspapers (this bit may be edited out) would not be allowed to put supplements in polythene bags; and foreign aid and intelligence-sharing would be denied to any country that refused to adopt the British plug.
At the moment you have the Labour Party saying it'd spend an extra ?37 billion on the NHS and the Tories thumbing their noses a day later and saying they'd spend ?38 billion. And we all roll our eyes, because we know this sort of stuff is important, like getting your tax return done on time and flossing regularly, but what really bothers you is that your wi-fi router keeps breaking down. That's what you really want the government to do. Something about that.
You have Corbyn dribbling on about how he'll introduce 42 more bank holidays and Theresa May saying she'll stop foreigners joining her golf club, and then you have Question Time, where all these things are discussed as though they are gravely important. Which they're not. Not when your husband has died and his bank account's been frozen and you don't know what probate means and you have to get a bus that's full of diseases to go to Citizens Advice, which is shut because the staff are on a two-day "equality in the workplace" course in Harpenden.
So you have to go back at the end of the week and you're cross that you've been made to wait, so you shout at the young woman behind the counter and she calls the security guard because abuse of staff is not tolerated, so you're back on the bus, which now smells of sick, and you still don't know what probate means and what you're supposed to do with the endless forms that keep slithering through your letterbox.
A person such as this is going to vote for any party that says it will encourage customers to abuse counter staff.
Especially if it goes on to say that all workplace courses will be banned.