‘Dismissing global warming? That was a joke’:
Jeremy Clarkson on fury, farming and why he’s a changed man
The former Top Gear presenter claims his
controversialist persona was just a caricature, and he’s really a reformed
character living the good life. But do old habits die hard?
by
Charlotte Edwardes
Sat 27 Apr
2024 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/apr/27/jeremy-clarkson-interview-global-warming-fury-farming
“Are you
happy?” I ask Jeremy Clarkson. A few times on Clarkson’s Farm, you said were
happy. His thick eyebrows seem low, like storm clouds gathering. “I said that
in season one, episode one,” he replies. “And I meant it then. Lockdown was a
blessed relief. You thought: no one’s inviting me out, I don’t have to go
anywhere. Lisa would say, ‘Let’s go on holiday again next weekend.’ And I could
say, ‘No! We can’t!’ It was brilliant. We were stuck here. So I was very happy
at work then.” Didn’t he say he was happy at another point, while building his
pigpen or sowing on his tractor? He looks at me, eyebrows locking, lips pursed
in thought. He has perfect recall of the entire Clarkson’s Farm archive. He was
pleased when he did those things, but it wasn’t a blanket expression of
happiness. Pleased? “Well, what did I do for 25 years? I drove around corners
shouting and achieved nothing. Nothing! And then you plant a field of mustard,
which I did last year, and some of it grew. Not as much as I’d been hoping, but
some. So you have a sense of achievement.”
Could we
allow for the possibility that he might be contented, then? Clarkson concedes
that springtime is nice. “This is going to sound awfully pretentious, but I’ve
never noticed the buds coming on the trees before. I spent a good 20 minutes
yesterday staring at buds, going, is that too early? Or is that later than
normal?”
Reasons
Jeremy Clarkson might have to be happy: his Amazon Prime show Clarkson’s Farm
is the most watched on the streamer in the UK and series four has already been
commissioned. He hosts Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and writes two newspaper
columns, has his own brewery and is looking to buy a pub. He has a beautiful
Georgian-style Palladian house, built in honey-coloured stone atop a gently
sloping hill. His bedroom has a balcony with stone balustrades and miles of
galloping rural views. He has a beautiful not-wife, but wife-adjacent partner
in the form of towering Irish blond Lisa Hogan, Aunt Sally to his Worzel
Gummidge. He has two fox-red Labrador bitches, Arya and Sansa, whom he is not
supposed to feed crisps from the table, but does. He has pigs of all shapes and
sizes including new little piglets. “I love my pigs, truly love my pigs.”
So he can
sit at his kitchen island, laptop on the polished stone, surrounded by 10-foot
windows, and think of ideas for shows, columns, what to have for supper. He can
walk over to the fridge and eat the mustard he grew, feeling that sense of
achievement you get when you plant something with a tractor, “which is quite
complicated”, as opposed to in a vegetable garden. He can have Sunday lunch
with beef or lamb from the farm, gravy made with flour from the farm,
vegetables from the farm, potatoes and even beer from the farm. This is all, in
his words, “properly satisfying”.
This is just me being me, for once. I don’t have to
think, ‘Right, I’m going to say something stupidly provocative now’
It’s a very
different Clarkson to the one I interviewed eight years ago. Back then, on a
spring morning like this one, he’d been sitting at the bottom of a swimming
pool in Barbados with a head-crushing hangover and an oxygen tank, wondering
what to do with his life. “My luck stopped suddenly,” he said then. He was
grieving his mother, angry at the explosive end to his career at the BBC (he
was sacked for punching a producer in 2015), defensive that he’d been forced to
go “somewhere like prison” (a clinic) for “stress” (treatment) and had given up
drinking for four months. Over two days, I watched him move seamlessly from
beer at 11am to wine to banana daiquiris to wine again, while making his way
through 60 cigarettes, boxes stacked beside him.
But when I
suggest the Clarkson before me today is a changed man, happier, maybe one age
has mellowed – he’s 64 – or maybe one who has less to be angry about, now that
every TV concept he’s had since has been not just gold, but pure 24-carat
liquid gold on tap, he bridles. “No, no, no. I’ve got slightly more air in my
lungs. But changed, no. People’s perception of me may have changed, but I
haven’t.” The Clarkson I met before, the one everyone watched on Top Gear,
followed by The Grand Tour, the one who wrote outrageous things (which we will
get to), that Clarkson was a caricature, “a comic creation”, he insists.
“Everyone assumes the character they see on motoring shows is me, but it’s
exaggerated. To think that I was like I was on Top Gear is the same as thinking
that Anthony Hopkins is a cannibal.”
He feels no
pressure to be controversial any more. He can say a line like, “I noticed the
buds today” and it can mean that and not have a perverse double meaning.
“That’s just me being me, for once. I don’t have to think, ‘Right, I’m going to
say something stupidly provocative now.’ That’s relaxing.” Pause. “Also, you,”
he means him, “don’t wake up every morning to find you’re in the middle of a
tabloid maelstrom for something you’ve said or done.” I study his face for a
flicker. It remains impassive, a bear emerged from a 500-year hibernation.
Can we talk
about what he wrote in the Sun in December 2022 about the Duchess of Sussex?
“You can try. You won’t get anywhere.” Clarkson said his hatred of Meghan
operated on a “cellular level”, that he disliked her more than the serial
killer Rose West and fantasised of a day “when she is made to parade naked
through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’
and throw lumps of excrement at her”. It was written in the controversial era,
he says, the era he has just told me is firmly behind him, “So, actually, I’ve
already addressed that.” Right, it wasn’t the real you.
Is it true
the Sun’s editor tried to stop him, but he went over her head? “I won’t say
anything. Put me in a half-nelson and I won’t say anything.” Is it right he
emailed Harry to apologise, and Harry didn’t email back? “Honestly, I’m not
talking about that. There’s enough to be talking about with farming. You can
say you tried.”
Later, I
see a wicked twitch in the mouth of nouveau era Clarkson, when the idea of
baiting me becomes irresistible. “I don’t have to be contrary, but I might say
something Guardian readers might say, ‘That’s contrary.’ Badgers are a case in
point. Badgers are much loved in certain circles. Not here.” Wildlife group
activists – “hunt saboteurs” – report him for illegally filling in badger setts
which means there’s a policeman in a stab vest in his kitchen on a near weekly
basis. “But we haven’t filled in a badger’s sett. There’s no point, because
we’ve shot them. So is it contrary to say we’ve shot our badgers? It’s a true
fact. So, yeah, it’s difficult to know where contrary starts and ends, really.”
When I
arrive from London, Clarkson is waiting for me, arm resting on the open window,
in the car park of the local train station. It’s a glorious spring morning, sky
wide open across the vast Cotswolds landscape. We speed past hedgerows of
hawthorn blossom in his old Land Rover, moss-green and muddy in the footwell.
He’s smoked so much in this car over the years that even the steering wheel has
emphysema. He slows so that I can hear a noise like an expiratory wheeze when
he turns it. Does he miss smoking? “No.” He chews nicotine gum constantly.
About him are balls of it, carefully removed from his mouth and placed on the
closest convenient surface once the active ingredient has been thoroughly
drained into his bloodstream, before he pops another from the blister pack.
On the
gravel outside his house there is topiary of a dog cocking his leg, a white
Aston Martin (“a bargain”) and a brand new Land Rover (“Lisa’s”). There’s also
a red vintage Massey Ferguson, waxed to a sheen. “Vintage tractors: mark of a
hobby farmer,” he says when I stop to admire it (later he’ll say the same of
chickens; “hobby farmers” are evidently low in farming hierarchy). The Massey
had to have a new engine after his neighbour David Cameron, the David Cameron,
Lord, and current foreign secretary, blew it up. “He’s got his own tractor
now,” Clarkson says.
The
Camerons live on the left side of the valley. Across there is Rebekah Brooks,
CEO of News UK, queen of the “country supper”. He dots the landscape with his
finger naming people. Film people, business people, aristos. Not far are Lord
and Lady Bamford, the Conservative party donors who lent Boris Johnson a house
when he was ejected. No wonder Chipping Norton has a reputation for being an
incestuous nest of media and politics. As I’m saying this, Clarkson spies a
lorry coming up the road to his house. “Not another fucking delivery,” he
mutters, darkly. “Lisa’s.”
In the
kitchen he insists I try their water because it tastes delicious. He recently
had a glass of tap water in London and mouth-sprayed it across the room in
disgust; London is a place he rarely visits. Now, his life has contracted to
this small corner of the Cotswolds. He’s been here on and off nearly 30 years
(previously with his second wife, Frances Cain, mother of his three grown-up
children). Judging by the bored “Mornings” from locals, they’ve just about come
to terms with him. Diddly Squat is the 1,000 acre working farm he bought in
2008. It comprises a farm shop run by Lisa, a burger van, 29 goats, 60-70 pigs,
seven cows (soon to be 30-40), 40 chickens, 100 sheep and a cat. “Lisa’s cat,
not my cat.” He had a restaurant in the lamb barn but the council closed it.
Clarkson’s
Farm is gentler than The Grand Tour. There’s hugging and crying – I can’t say
why because I’ve signed an NDA. There’s a lovers’ tiff between Clarkson and
Kaleb Cooper, his young blond-mopped farmer foil. A concession to car fans was
buying an enormous Lamborghini R8 270 DCR tractor in series one. Don’t worry,
lads, he hasn’t forgotten you in the new series! When the vet asks if they have
lube to help the pigs give birth, Clarkson suggests Lisa does. Teehee. There
are further run-ins with the council over planning permissions for the shop and
van. I fear this storyline may set off frothing over red tape.
Clarkson
has filed 11 applications since he bought the farm (the latest at Christmas for
a large grain store) which lies in an area of outstanding natural beauty –
“Because farmers have made it outstanding,” he points out. “Nothing natural out
there.” He says the government tells farmers to diversify, to use buildings and
broaden businesses. “But if you try, your local authority will say, no, you
can’t. We put in for planning permission to turn the lambing barn into a
restaurant and all hell broke loose.” In this series, the future of the burger
van hangs in the balance. The council have denied a “vendetta” against
Clarkson, driven by a few newcomers, but the highs and lows are woven through
the show.
At one
point in 2022, “when it was getting really sticky”, Clarkson remembered he knew
Michael Gove – who is in charge of planning – and rang him up. “Put it this
way, he was the person in government who I actually had a phone number for. I
thought, ‘Who do I know? Boris has gone. Cameron’s gone. Gove!’” Clarkson says
it was “flattering” that Gove agreed to a meeting and he was expecting a quick
coffee in Whitehall, but, “bugger me, he’d got half the government in there.
Kemi Badenoch and countless others. It seems to have done the trick, though.
Exactly what I said to him now seems to be becoming reality. In the papers this
morning, a Defra minister said, ‘I’ve just had enough of these local councils’
and he’s going to make it easier for farmers to convert buildings into gyms and
things, so that’s good.”
In the
first series, the farm turned a profit of £144. He blames uncontrollable
outside forces, such as extreme weather: “Somebody’s going to say, ‘You drive
cars!’ but you know what I mean.” This year earnings were better, but still not
a living wage. Yes, he knows he is not going to starve, but most farmers don’t
have TV shows and they are “fucked. And it’s terrifying because they’re going
to have to sell. The farms are going to be snapped up by hedge funders or
farming conglomerates, who will see hedgerows and woods as annoyances and will
bulldoze and turn England into Canada. We will lose the countryside unless we
protect farmers.”
I don’t have long. I’ve probably only got, what,
70,000 hours left, maybe?
He
highlights the suicide rate in farming, “worse than any other industry”. Low
wages combined with the loneliness of 12-14 hours a day in a tractor is lethal,
he says. “They’re thinking, ‘I can’t afford the diesel, I can’t afford the
seed, and there’s a risk the weather will be all wrong and it’ll be pointless
and wasted.’”
Proximity
to nature has made him far more aware of the climate. He measures rainfall like
a meteorologist, so if you say it was a wet weekend, he’ll be able to tell you
it was 25mm. He can also tell you that we’ve already had this year’s allocation
of rain because it’s always 38in, “give or take”, and this is “a fucking
nightmare” because you need varied weather for farming. Where does that put his
shrugging disregard for global warming on his motoring shows? “That was part of
the caricature,” he says. “It was a joke.” He mocks his own controversial era
voice, saying, “Oh, come on.” Then says, “Now you think, ‘Jesus Christ, my
neighbours over there, they’ve had to replant everything because it’s all
drowned.’ I can’t believe it’s not dominating the news agenda,” he adds
sardonically. “Oh no, wait, it is.”
It is,
except Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have both scrapped their green commitments,
I say. “Because they don’t really work and they won’t achieve anything,” he
counters. Would he take a role as a climate tsar? “No, no, no.” Why? “I won’t
drive a Tesla. I’ve got probably 10 cars, all with V8 engines. I don’t think
electric cars solve anything. Science is going to be needed here, not politics.
Science will solve it eventually. Always does.”
In time? He
pouts. “Don’t know. It’s happening really fast. That’s what always surprises
me. In the last five years, I’ve noticed a dramatic change here – ”He breaks
off and smirks. “I’m like a Guardian reader’s wet dream, aren’t I?” Then
continues, “It hasn’t snowed for five years. We probably get a minute of sleet.
We used to get snowed in every year.” Does he still hate Greta Thunberg? “Well,
I’m not going to be lectured by someone who’s never been to school.” Doesn’t he
tell A-level students on X every year that school doesn’t matter? “It doesn’t,
but you need to learn something. You could say, The School of Life, but she
hasn’t been to that either.”
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‘I come from a generation where we stiffen the upper
lip and get on with it.’
He nips off
to speak to someone and Lisa pops her head round the door, hesitant. She’s
blonde, freckly, very smiley, very tall. She whispers that she has a present
for me: two bottles of scent she’s launching at the farm shop called Wet and
Drive. Yes, seriously. She perches, cautious, on the sofa and we talk about
kids. When her three and Clarkson’s three get together on holiday, they slag
them both off, but in her eyes that’s the mark of a successful blended family.
“What are
you two talking about?” Clarkson seems cross, coming back in, and it occurs to
me that he thinks she’s stealing his interview. Lisa singsongs, “Nothing” and
slips away. We are sitting in his second or third sitting room – he has another
with a stocked circular bar, like a cruise ship. This one has a wall of Dinky
Toys from his childhood, a ball of chewed Nicorette and a dental floss stick on
the ottoman, and the biggest TV I’ve ever seen. “There’s an even bigger TV next
door,” he says, “because I’m blind and deaf.” Recently he had hearing aids
fitted, which he’s enjoying, if mostly for their comic potential. “I’ve tuned
them to dial out the Irish accent, which makes my life much more comfortable.”
Ho ho. Clearly the accent tickles him because Lisa is subtitled in one scene.
He’s tried
Ozempic, “Didn’t lose any weight on it. I saw Flavio Briatore the other day.
Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting he has been on Ozempic, but holy cow, he
looked like Willem Dafoe: unbelievably thin. I’m just getting fatter. I’m
surrounded by all this great food. Yesterday morning we had boar bacon. Good
God, you can’t not eat it. Then there’s the venison: delicious. Lisa is growing
potatoes like crazy.” Surely, he walks it all off outdoors? He pulls a face,
puts his hand on his tummy. “I was going for a walk yesterday and had to stop,
I was so exhausted. But my lungs are probably cleaner.”
What about
drinking? “Well, I don’t drink when I’m operating heavy machinery, that’s for
sure. While it’s legal to sit in a tractor with a refreshing glass of beer or
wine, you wouldn’t be operating any of the stuff on the back if you want both
your arms on at the end of the day.”
We’re back
in the Land Rover on our way to the pub for lunch and halfway down his private
road we meet a grey BMW. A man who doesn’t look as if he’s from Amazon leaps
out with a package. “My book,” he says, passing it through the window. It’s a
self-published work and comes with a note: “From one car enthusiast to
another.” Well, he can’t read, Clarkson observes: “The sign on the gate says
absolutely no public.”
This is a
benign ambush compared with the time there was a man sitting in his kitchen.
Clarkson assumed he was with the crew and carried on working on his laptop. “He
was looking at me writing the voiceover for Clarkson’s Farm and said, ‘Oh, is
this the new series?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I was chatting away, then suddenly went,
‘Who are you?’ And he went, ‘I was just passing.’ I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, you
cannot just walk into somebody’s house and pull up a chair.’ He looked a bit
baffled. They all do. The other day there was a knock on the door. Four sweet
little kids. Their mothers at the gate, going, ‘Go on, kids.’ Like, ‘Walk in.’
I was like, no! You have to be nice to the children, obviously, it’s not their
fault. But I did take their mothers to one side and say, ‘You can’t do that.’”
Arguably the worst encounter was Lisa coming out of the shower in a towelling
robe and bumping into a couple having a nosy around. Their attitude, Clarkson
says, was, “He’s on television, he won’t mind.”
After the
pub, where he has two swift rosés, I ask, because his friends have told me how
happy he is with Lisa, if he’d marry again. He says no. He’s been married twice
– his first wife, Alex Hall, left him after six months for one of his best
friends. Earlier I’d asked if he’d been hurt by anything in his life. “Oh God,
countless things. But you’ve got two choices: wallow or stiffen your upper lip
and get on with it. I come from a generation where,” he’d inhaled deeply, “we
stiffen the upper lip and get on with it.” An element of his “park that and
move on” approach is an increasing preoccupation with his own mortality. “I
don’t have long,” he says. “I’ve probably only got what, 70,000 hours left,
maybe?”
After an
afternoon tramping round the farm, we kick off our wellies and go in for tea.
Clarkson is less fidgety than earlier, but seems a touch riled. His back was
hurting by the chickens and goats, and when we went to see the pigs, he looked
in real pain. He says he’s fine. He’ll take painkillers. I raise something we
discussed years ago: how he was bullied as a boarder at Repton School,
routinely beaten over his head and back with a suitcase. Perhaps he’s annoyed
he ever mentioned it, or now sees it as the tear-stained soft toy subject of
pampered millennials. Either way, he’s dismissive. “I don’t want to belittle
bullying which can be dreadful. But it didn’t do me any harm. Actually, I’m
glad I was bullied.” Why? “Because I was a bit of a prick. And I wasn’t a prick
after I’d been hit over the head with a suitcase. The priggishness was knocked
out.” That sounds like you’re saying you asked for it. “I don’t really want to
get into bullying because it’s such a bloody awful subject.”
We sit at
the table and look at the astonishing blue glow of the late afternoon sky. Lisa
opens some Diddly Squat crisps for me to try, pours some rosé and asks advice
on the copy she’s written for the label on the Diddly Squat honey tequila. She
has a 50/50 deal with Clarkson on profits from the Diddly Squat merch, in
addition to her TV appearance fees. She makes the point that she needs to think
of her retirement because if he were to drop dead, his kids would turf her out.
This echoes what he told me – that they have no interest in the farm. “I keep
telling them, listen, when I’m dead, I don’t want you to sell it. They look at
me like, ‘Are you joking?’”
We discuss
retirement. The idea makes him shudder, and a retirement “hobby” makes him want
to walk into his gun vault and “shoot myself in the head”. (He feels the same
about film premieres.) He tried to write “a crash, bang, wallop” thriller a
couple of years ago, but couldn’t get past chapter one because he hated
describing rooms. But it’s OK, he has two or three other ideas for his final
70,000 hours. He wants to open a pub. “We found one the other day which isn’t
called The Shaven Mound, but is in my mind. Astonishingly beautiful, 750 years
old, but parking would be impossible.”
Of all my
questions, his favourite is whether he’s a secret lefty. He chuckles,
repeating, “Am I secret lefty?” to himself all day long. In 2020, he said he’d
consider voting for Keir Starmer. Today he says he has “genuinely” no idea who
he’ll vote for. He despairs of the broken NHS – which was invented at a time
when “we only had broken arms and aspirins, not heart transplants. But what do
you do about it? I literally haven’t got a clue. Roads? Dunno. Airports? I know
exactly what I’d do there: my own airline, “I’ll-Take-My-Chances Air. Drive up
to the plane. No security, no passports. Get on. And it takes off. If it blows
up, it blows up. If it crashes, it crashes. Just have planes lined up – like
buses – with where they’re going in the window. That’s the only political thing
I could do, mend air travel.” (Afterwards Amazon’s PR rings to check he didn’t
make any political statements and I decide this probably doesn’t count.)
Listening
to my tape back, I hear the glug of wine regularly poured. Lisa tells me they
usually get through at least two bottles a night. They recently went to a
health retreat in Portugal, she says. “It wasn’t hard not to drink those few
days.” But Clarkson was miserable, the juice diet made him ill, and he ended up
in hospital with an abscess on his back. She starts to describe lancing it
herself, saying it was like the film Alien, and the cyst got baby cysts, “and
he got greyer and greyer and almost died”. He grumbles in dissent. “No,” she
insists, “you had to have a 40-minute operation.”
In general,
she doesn’t want to analyse him (or for me to), because if you solve the
mystery of why he’s like he is, she argues, you neutralise his genius, which
comes from his anguish, she believes. She told another journalist that Clarkson
likes watching war films of an evening. “I am pretty much word for word on
Where Eagles Dare, so she may have a point,” he says. He’s never watched Bake
Off, but “Countryfile used to be jolly good, didn’t it? And then it all just
became hijacked.” Who hijacked it? He gives me a look and I sense the presence
of controversial era Clarkson. “Well, with the greatest of respect, the
Guardian community at the BBC looked at it and thought, ‘No, we can’t have all
these country people.’ So nowadays it’s just a smörgåsbord of everything that’s
necessary for a modern-day television programme to be commissioned.
“I saw one
item recently where a woman went with another woman into a wood and was invited
to lay down under a tree and it looked awfully soggy, but she lay down and was
invited to hum. I couldn’t see what that had to do with Countryfile. I also
noticed that Adam Henson [the presenter], who I like very much, said ‘a cow’s
gestation period was the same as it is for people’. I thought, ‘You didn’t say
people in the first take, did you? You said women. And somebody said, ‘Could
you do it again and say people?’ I’d have told them to fuck off.” He looks at
me, turns his palm up to continue the point. “This is Sunday night on BBC.
Average age of the audience? 60? Social demographic? ABC1. They don’t want to
be told men have babies. Because they’ll go, ‘No they don’t, what are you on
about? It’s Countryfile. Stop confusing me. I’m very old and set in my ways.’”
He seems relieved to have got this off his chest.
I ask how
often his children roll their eyes at him for being contrary. He protests that
“it’s difficult to know what contrary is. The other day I said something, and
they said, ‘You can’t say that!’ I said, ‘Well, you could three weeks ago.’
What was it the other day that I got told I couldn’t say?” Fortunately, he
can’t remember. “It’s complicated being not contrary,” he insists, undermining
what he told me at the start of the day. “It’s complicated saying anything.”
Clarkson’s Farm series 3 launches globally on
Prime Video on 3 May.
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