The meaning of Jeremy Clarkson

When visiting New Zealand in early 2009 with his Top Gear colleagues, Jeremy Clarkson was in the middle of nowhere and had an urge to play Risk - that ultimate boy's board game of world domination. But they had no Risk set. So he did the obvious thing - and sent a helicopter to the nearest town to pick one up.

Clarkson's 50 years in pictures

A few years back, someone started work on an unauthorised biography of Clarkson. The writer quickly gave up - there wasn't anything more to say about Clarkson that he himself had not already revealed in his myriad newspaper and magazine columns, DVDs, best-selling books - as well as - of course - on Sunday nights on BBC2.

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So as he celebrates his 50th birthday today, what can be said about him that he has not said already? And more to the point, as we head towards a general election, what does his undeniable popularity say about this country and its people?

Making his mind up

The key facts are these: although nowadays a denizen of the Cotswold's town of Chipping Norton, he is a Yorkshireman born, bred and by temperament. He does not suffer fools gladly, gets bored quickly and easily, makes money with ease, and is absolutely certain that he is right about everything.

The world of Jeremy Clarkson

Although sure about his convictions, he does not always remember what they are. When we interviewed him last year and asked him what his favourite supercar was, he paused and you could sense him delving deep into the bulging databank that is his brain. He remarked some time ago that he had to ask the people in the Top Gear office about whether or not he liked the Renault Clio.

And the contradictions go far beyond what he can remember. He loves old cars, but excoriates them for being unreliable and lacking in equipment and has stated that on any level, new cars are much better.

He thought the Iraq war was a stupid idea well before the invasion, and vis-à-vis 9/11 likened it to America invading China after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. But that doesn't stop him using his considerable influence to raise money for injured troops and ensuring they get the respect they deserve from the rest of us, at home with our broadband Wi-Fi and flat-screen television sets.

His film about his war hero father-in-law Robert Cain was sobering and he was clearly fascinated by the fact that Cain never told his family the fact that he had won the Victoria Cross. Bombastic in manner, even Clarkson sometimes pauses to think. His 'Great Britons' film in 2002 about the great engineer Brunel was easily the best of the series and almost denied victory to the obvious winner, Winston Churchill. The film illustrated how Brunel showed where the world was heading - rather than where it started from - and revealed that, given the chance, Clarkson can produce some of the most thoughtful programmes on television.

His road testing style often follows a familiar path: he is so counter-intuitive that he is almost predictable. He says a car is really good, until he concludes the car isn't. This was reflected in his reviews of the Ferrari 599 and the Nissan GT-R. Of the latter, he appeared to say it was just too good.

Conversely, he says cars are really bad, but ends up saying they are really good. Of the ludicrous £98,000 Audi Q7 V12 diesel, he concluded that it was "rubbish, yet brilliant", or the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst, "ghastly but utterly, utterly lovable."

Finally, although he appears to have a rampaging ego, he is also self-deprecating about his waistline and other shortcomings, and will take jokes at his expense. When he was custard-pied in 2006 by an environmentalist he smiled and just commented "a bit too salty". When barricaded by a tyre wall into a toilet at a motoring event he laughed it off.

It could be that in his mass of contradictions he simply holds a mirror to us all. But the biggest contradiction of all in the life of Jeremy Clarkson is the fact that he owes his career and his millions to an organisation that he - on the surface at least - is totally at odds with: the BBC.


Relations with Auntie

Top Gear is presented by three white middle-class males, and it is hard to believe the BBC is making such a show in this day and age. They did apparently come close to hiring a woman - but even then the lady - Emma Parker-Bowles - was a blonde blue-blood who hardly would have satisfied the diversity authorities.

The great Belgian cartoonist Hergé once said his Tintin character was for all young people aged seven to seventy-seven, and Top Gear is the same. The show - and its central star - transcends age, gender and class divides like few others. Many fans of Top Gear and its values are people who might otherwise resent the BBC and all it stands for.

Top Gear is a phenomenon, making pots of money for the BBC on the international stage. Clarkson himself doesn't do badly out of it, making around £1.8m a year from the show alone. But the relationship between Clarkson and Beeb is a fascinating one: his views are at great variance to the BBC liberal-left culture, yet they somehow co-exist.

Clarkson could retire tomorrow, but the BBC knows that it needs him and Top Gear to help justify the licence fee in a multi-channel world. The irony is tremendous: the BBC, kept alive by Top Gear, a deeply conservative show.

Except Clarkson wouldn't retire. If he retired, what would he do? He seems to have little interest in money, and lazing about on a yacht is something that would he would bore of within five minutes. And no old-peoples' home for him either; he will only retire when he is in a box.

And I doubt he would leave the BBC. Sure, he likes to tweak its moustache like when he drove a tiny microcar into BBC Television Centre and parodied its obsession with diversity meetings; he was even allowed on screen to admire the bottom of a leading female news reader.

But the BBC is the devil-he-knows; it complains about his humour but would never sack him unless it really had to. Clarkson himself has become adept at staying just on the right side of the humour fence; he is well aware of - and has derided - the influence of the 'culture of complaining' that has grown exponentially during the New Labour years, whereby all humour must never insult or hurt anyone on Planet Earth.

But although he has come close to the line on numerous occasions involving gay people ('very ginger beer'), lorry drivers ('check mirror and murder a prostitute'), Labour prime ministers ('one-eyed idiot') among many others, he always survives.

Recently, Clarkson was offered a truckload of money to make the American version of Top Gear; he refused: he would be away from his family, he doesn't need the money, and one gets the strong impression he doesn't like America very much. A pilot programme was made by NBC, but apparently focus groups just didn't understand it and it has never been broadcast.

It could be that - again - Clarkson's attitude to the BBC mirrors our own: we may resent it slightly and its elitist Islington viewpoint but we deep down know that it is rather better than the alternative: the ruthlessly commercial and largely unwatchable world that is American ad-funded television.

The man and his motors

But if Clarkson's influence is big on broadcasting it is nothing compared to his impact on the car industry. He is by a long way the most influential motoring journalist in the land. After he waxed lovingly about the DB9 on Top Gear in 2004, Aston Martin sold a year's production the next day.

At the other end of the scale, his characteristically odd support for the weird little van-based Citroen Berlingo also saw that car become a big seller overnight, and he must have helped to shift hundreds of Volvo XC90s, of which he has owned three. Car PR offices live in dread of a bad Clarkson review. He likes Jaguars, Ferraris and Mercedes' and has owned all of them at one stage or other - but never a BMW or a Porsche.

A cultural wind vane?
In the recent Press Gazette top comment writers award, 1,000 members of the public voted together with 32 professional newspaper commentators. Clarkson came third overall for his work for the Sunday Times and The Sun, despite not getting a single vote from one of his journalist colleagues. Perhaps they didn't feel he needed the help.

His popularity is clear. Britain's liberal elite abhors him - not least because they know they have nothing like such an articulate cheerleader for their cause: yes, there is Stephen Fry, but even he is essentially a conservative figure with his suits, posh dinners and weekends with Prince Charles.

Another key aspect to Clarkson's popularity is that people genuinely think they know him, and his views on a whole panoply of subjects from the obvious - New Labour, environmentalism, health and safety-ism (he hates them all) to the more obscure: left-handed folk (deeply suspicious of them). His style of writing is to spill out his heart.

And indeed it is his heart and not his head that rules him, like many conservatives. And by the way Clarkson is most certainly a conservative if not necessarily a Conservative, though he did have near-neighbour David Cameron over to a party last New Year's Eve. He is suspicious of change and modernity while - contradictory again - loving the technology and toys that such things bring.

Like the rest of us, he loves the past, until he doesn't. He understands - and evokes - the fears and hopes of middle England like nothing else this side of the Daily Mail. And while the Mail frightens more than it inspires, Clarksonism promises a rather more devilish, raffish version of the future.

One might conclude that Clarkson's enduring popularity suggests that the Conservatives should walk the election. But with the political class of all colours disgraced by the expenses scandal, perhaps it is not so simple. When we asked Clarkson last year to choose between 'Commons' and 'Lords', he grimaced and said "neither".

When all's said and done, Clarkson lives life to the full; when we asked him to choose between past, present and future he very firmly said "present." He enjoys a fag and a glass of wine and watches girls walking by with his chum James May. He sends a helicopter to buy a board game. He keeps an old jet fighter in his garden, and when the council tell him to remove it he claims it is a leaves' blower.

He does and says whatever he wants, and gets paid huge sums to play with fast cars in exotic places. In short, he is a teenager with money - no wonder he is so easily loved and loathed, all at the same time.