No diva, but too swish for muddy fields
The Clarkson Review: Range Rover (Jan. 10)
I was out in my woods the other day collecting logs when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted what looked like a fox darting into one of my pheasant pens.
Luckily I was not packing heat, because it turned out to be a fox-coloured spaniel. It bounded over when I called, all ears, tongue and waggly tail, and I quickly deduced by reading the tag on its collar that it was called Rory. It's not for nothing that, round these parts, they call me "the detective".
There was also a telephone number, so I called it and it went straight to voicemail. Strange. If you lose a dog, you tend to treat your phone in the same way a sailor who has fallen overboard treats a life raft. It's the one link you have to the happy life you knew.
Perhaps, then, the owner had left his phone at home when he had taken his dog for a walk and was, even now, rampaging around the Cotswolds, in the manner of the chap who took the deer-chasing Fenton for a stroll in Richmond Park.
I waited and strained my ears, but could hear no one shouting "Rory!" And so, with darkness approaching, I decided I'd take the dog home. But there was a small problem: how exactly would I do that?
My farm car, a 13-year-old Range Rover, had been for a service the week before, and just one day later had broken down. Subsequent investigations suggested that one or both of its turbos had failed, along with the intercooler. It was, to use a simple English translation, buggered, and would cost more to mend than it was worth.
My other Range Rover — I like Range Rovers, OK? — was out of action too, because someone had borrowed it just the day before and had some kind of accident.
The third Range Rover that lives on the farm was, that day, doing errands in Norfolk, and the fourth, a brand-new 2021 model I had on loan that week from Land Rover, was far too new and shiny to be used for transporting a very muddy spaniel.
And so we arrive at the biggest — and only — problem with this car. It was designed 50 years ago to do two jobs. You could use it on the farm during the day, and then, after hosing down the interior, use it at night to go to the opera. No other car has ever been able to pull that trick off. Not even the Mercedes G-wagen.
I said last week that the Volkswagen Golf GTI was the only car you need, and that's true — unless you want to do farming during the day and then go to the opera at night. In which case the only car you need is a Range Rover.
So why then do I own two? Ah, well, that's the issue. My four-year-old Vogue SE is a bit plush. I use it mostly for going to and from London. I don't even use it for shooting. And I'm not alone. Most of my friends round these parts have Range Rovers as well — it's a uniform, really — and it's the same story with all of them.
With the new version the problem is more acute because there are glass screens for all the controls and new, softer, wider seating, which is upholstered in the finest leather. It can be used, of course, for uprooting trees and transporting logs and pulling stranded tractors out of the ditch, but you wouldn't, any more than you'd play football with that Louis Vuitton ball that was recently offered online for more than £4,000.
Land Rover would say that you can still do all these hirsute, manly things with other cars in its range, but I'm not interested in its other cars. I'm sure they're very nice, but I like the Range Rover. The proper one with the splitfolding tailgate and the imperious driving position.
And the new one is even better. The engines, for the most part, are smaller than ever, but thanks to all manner of electronic trickery and hybrid tech they are even more powerful. So now, with the diesel D350 model, you get all the torque you need and about 30mpg. Greta Thunberg should get one.
More impressive still, however, is the way this new car glides. I used it to get from Chipping Norton to Manchester, via Ludlow in Shropshire, which meant we barely touched the motorway network at all, and it was sublime. According to the company's blurb it has the same suspension setup as before, so it must be the seats, or fairy dust, but something makes it uncannily comfortable.
It was also fun. I'm not suggesting it's a Mazda MX-5 or a Porsche 911. It's not fun like that. But it is a hoot to zoom along at a fair old lick in something that weighs more than Lincoln Cathedral.
But what about reliability? People say Range Rovers have always been hopeless, yet the fact of the matter is that my four-year-old car has been as solid and as dependable as John Terry. And the much older 57-plate car was reliable too, until its turbo seized. So it has also been like John Terry. Brilliant — if we ignore the fact he allegedly slept with a team-mate's girlfriend.
Despite everything, though, we can no longer judge the Range Rover as a dual-purpose car. It's a great everyday car, but when it comes to driving a muddy dog two miles cross-country, you'll need an old Toyota pick-up as well.
I don't have an old Toyota pick-up, but I do have a six-wheel-drive former army Supacat. So my girlfriend brought that to the wood, we put Rory in the back and off we went.
Later, after I'd given him some of the stew I'd made the night before — he liked it, unlike everyone else — and a bowl of water, I tried the number again, and this time it was answered very quickly by a woman. But I couldn't hear what she was saying because in the background there was a clearly distraught little girl sobbing and saying over and over: "Is it Rory? Is it Rory?"
I explained that I did have Rory, and I then heard a whoop of relief. It's possibly the nicest sound I've ever heard. The sheer joy of a little girl finding out that her lost dog is safe and well.
It put me in such a good mood that I'm going to give the new Range Rover five stars. It's so good at doing the opera part of its job that we can ignore the fact it's now too posh to do farming.
I've also decided that whatever it takes, I'm going to repair the broken engine in my old car. Because it's been in the family so long, it's become our Rory.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is there anyone honourable in government who'll take on this deadly cladding disaster? (Jan. 10)
What a winter. America is teetering on the brink of civil war, a more infectious new strain of the virus has arrived from South Africa, we are all locked up like hedgehogs, Brexit is messing up food supplies to Northern Ireland and the normally placid state of Denmark has been rocked by a children's animation featuring a man with an enormously long penis.
And I've not been able to concentrate on any of it because, as a result of the Grenfell fire, the insurance bill for the six-storey building where I have a flat in London is set to rise from £8,000 a year to more than £60,000.
When I found out, I made some noises in
The Sun, and immediately a government housing wallah called Baron Greenhalgh who sounds as if he should be a Child Catcher/Dick Dastardly baddie in that Danish penis story went on Twitter to say I can afford it.
Yes, Your Baronness. I could also afford to buy every corner shop in Hartlepool, but that doesn't mean I want to. And, anyway, as you acknowledge, most of the tens of thousands of people affected by these gigantic insurance premium hikes cannot. And I really do mean gigantic. Some have gone up by 1,200%.
These people desperately need to get rid of the troublesome cladding that cocoons their high-rise properties, and many are saying that the bill for this should be met by the developers, who have profited wildly from the housing boom in recent years. This has struck a chord with lazy, dimwit socialists, who say that the boss of a housing company has a jet and an island, while the people who bought his flats are having to burn their cats to stay warm.
For sure, the Grenfell inquiry is discovering that some halfwits from some two-bit companies were running around like contestants on
The Apprentice, actively boasting about how they got round the fire regulations, but most property development companies were following the guidelines laid down by the government. And, plainly, those guidelines weren't good enough. They certainly weren't easy to understand and they definitely weren't enforced properly. It's the government, then, that must be held accountable.
However, right now, people with flats in high-rise buildings are not the only Oliver Twists at the door of No 11, queuing up for a bit of gruel. Travel agents, gym owners, publicans, airlines, cruise ship operators, hairdressers, dog groomers, farmers and sex workers are all pleading with the Treasury for help. Everyone is.
Rishi Sunak goes on the news most nights to say that his magic money tree is not bereft of fruit just yet, but the time will come when someone in a suit with a James Bond baddie accent says: "Look. You may be a sovereign state now, and you may be able to print as much cash as you like, but enough is enough." And then what?
Well, it seems to me that we should have a look at the insurance industry. Many companies are saying to those in high-rise buildings that they must employ fire wardens if they want to have any cover at all. And because mortgages insist on that cover, homeowners are being forced to acquiesce.
But hang on. If you are paying for burly men to patrol the corridors of your building 24 hours a day, with a wheelbarrow full of extinguishers, then there is absolutely no chance of a fire taking hold. Which means the cost of fire insurance should be zero.
In my building, the cladding is not flammable, the fire system would be rejected by the Louvre for being too exotic and the lift can be used even if there's an inferno. So why has there been an eightfold hike in the premium? It feels like blatant profiteering.
And on that front, there is hope, because insurance companies are not run by idiots. Fairly soon one of them will realise that if it lowers its prices, everyone will flock to its doors, which will force all the other companies to lower their prices too. It may take a while, but eventually I see the insurance premiums of today coming right back down again.
Maybe this is something the government could do: start the ball rolling by insisting on some reasonableness. That wouldn't cost it anything. But even if the premiums do come down, it doesn't really address the big issue: the fact that tens of thousands of people are holed up in flats that they know, for sure, will kill them if someone six floors down has a faulty toaster.
The hour's exercise these poor people get every day is not to keep them fit it's to let them breathe a sigh of relief.
And there's more. Because it's known that the flat they scrimped and saved to buy is a death trap, it is completely unsellable. So they are wasting thousands of pounds a month, paying off a mortgage on a flat that is worth less than their washing-up bowl. That's not what Mrs Thatcher promised.
I understand, of course, that property, like scratchcards and blackjack, is a gamble, and that sometimes it doesn't pay off. I once bought a flat because it overlooked the car park of the gym Diana, Princess of Wales used. And a week later she died. Which meant my flat had a view of a car park.
Sometimes it happens that they build a bypass through your back garden, or a railway line. It's a risk we take. But this cladding business goes beyond some poor sod losing his shirt. One night he could end up sitting in his window box, watching the fire brigade ladders wobbling about 50ft below him as he wonders whether to fry or fly.
I'm not sure that the evil Baron Greenhalgh is the man for the job, but we do need someone kind to sit down in a room with everyone involved and say: "Out of the goodness of our hearts, we simply must do something about this."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here's the
Sun column: "
England’s future now we’re out of the EU: Tiny nation with a lunatic leader"
For once the comments section shows Clarkson being attacked by right-wingers!
But the best part is not about Brexit:
"
Church of Jezza?
SO, it seems the people of Jezza, a wonderful little town in Uganda, east central Africa, have named their local church after me.
I’m not quite sure what I’ve done to deserve such an honour. Maybe it’s something to do with my initials. Or maybe they heard that I’d come back from the dead after catching Covid. Well, I’m sorry to pour cold water on that one but for me, Covid was nothing more than a small cold. If it’s worse for you, I shall pray for your swift recovery. And who knows? Now I have my own church, that might even work."