Steve Berry, a presenter on the BBC’s Top Gear for six years, can remember the moment he first rubbed up against Jeremy Clarkson’s ego and ambition. It was the mid-1990s and Berry had a new agent who suggested he should push to be the main presenter on the show.
“And I thought, ‘Yeah, OK, why not?’” recalled Berry, 60. “I just was constantly bombarding them with ideas and I got taken on one side by one of the directors, and he said: ‘You know Jeremy sits there and [he] times how much time he has on the programme’. I said: ‘You what?’ ‘He sits there with a stopwatch.’ I have no idea if this is true, but he says: ‘He’s worked out that in this season you have had this amount of screen time and if it were a title race you are only a few points off where he is.’ So the guy says: ‘So watch yourself.’ Next thing I know, I was dragged into [executive producer] Jon Bentley’s office. He said: ‘Sit down. You are never going to be the next Jeremy Clarkson, you know.’ I was basically being warned off.”
Relations barely improved when Berry gave an interview to the now defunct News of the World in which he jokily suggested it would suit him if Clarkson would “fall into a hole in the ground so I can have his job”. The paper splashed it.
“So that morning, his ex-wife Francie – who was the power behind the throne, she’s the one who made him what he is today – rang me up and lambasted me: ‘What is this in the News of the World? How can you possibly say this?’ I said: ‘I did say it but they have moved the words around to make it look really bad.’ She was going on and I said: ‘Francie, can I stop you? Where I come from if two men fall out they go out in the street and sort it out. They don’t get their fucking wife to call him up and chew his ear off.’”
There is no end to the list of people with whom Clarkson, 64, has clashed over the years. At its most extreme, punches were thrown at the editor of the Daily Mirror Piers Morgan, for printing pictures of Clarkson kissing someone other than his then wife, and the Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon, for failing to ensure the star could order a sirloin steak after a day of filming. Then there are the lower-grade rows with the Koreans, the Mexicans, the Germans, Poles, Malaysians, Welsh, the Duchess of Sussex, gay people, public sector strikers, lorry drivers and members of the West Oxfordshire district council after they stood in the way of his plans for the Diddly Squat farm he bought in 2008.
The latest subject of Clarkson’s ire has been Keir Starmer’s government – and, tangentially, his former employer, the BBC. Attending a farmers’ protest this week over changes to the rules of inheritance tax for agricultural land, Clarkson was confronted by Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire. He was there with the crew of his hit show, Clarkson’s Farm, to “support the farmers”, he said. “So it’s not about your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?” Derbyshire responded. “Classic BBC,” he said. “You told the Sunday Times in 2021 that was why you bought it,” she said.
Clarkson responded: “You people … BBC. OK, let’s start from the beginning. I wanted to shoot, OK? That’s even worse, to the BBC, I wanted to shoot. Which comes with the benefit of not having to pay inheritance tax. Now I do. But people like me will simply put it in a trust, and so long as I live for seven years, that’s fine. And as my daughter said: ‘You will live for seven years. You might be in a deep freeze at the end of it, but you will live for seven years.’ But it’s incredibly time-consuming to have to do that, and why should all these people have to do that?”
Tax experts suggest that even with such a trust Clarkson’s beneficiaries would face taxes of many hundreds of thousands of pounds on his substantial estate as there would be a 3% charge to pay every 10 years on assets over £1m. The presenter did not respond to a request for comment.
On a stage at Parliament Square, Clarkson, who recently underwent an emergency heart operation, gave an impromptu speech in defiance of doctors’ orders. The autumn budget was a “knee to the nuts” and “a light hammer blow to the back of the head”, he said. It was an echo of his previous claim that Labour had a “sinister plan” to “ethnically cleanse” farming communities. Among those attracted by such language was Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party, who posted a picture of himself in Clarkson’s Oxfordshire pub. “Jeremy Clarkson nails it,” Griffin wrote. It got some political commentators thinking. James Kanagasooriam, the polling expert who coined the term “red wall”, suggested that were Clarkson to enter politics, Britain could have its own Donald Trump moment. The idea was cheered in theDaily Telegraph. Is it so fanciful?
Clarkson’s mother, Shirley, whose business making Paddington teddy bears was the main source of the family’s wealth, recalled to a biographer that her recalcitrant son gave up working at his boarding school, Repton (where fees today top £45,000 a year). “He told us he didn’t think physics or maths were going to be any use to him because he was either going to be Alan Whicker, an astronaut or king – in that order,” she recalled. The result was that he was asked to leave the school before sitting his A-levels and ended up working for the family firm as a travelling salesman for cuddly toys.
There was then a brief period as a cub reporter at the Rotherham Advertiser but he walked out of that after being forced to cover a “ponies and produce” show. It was when he set up his own Motoring Press Agency, flogging syndicated columns on cars, that he got a lucky break while sitting next to a Top Gear producer at a car launch. He was asked to be screen tested, and a 40-year career in broadcasting was born.
His first marriage to Alexandra Hall in 1989 ended in divorce when she had an affair with his best friend. Clarkson subsequently injuncted the media from reporting “sexual or other intimate acts or dealings” with his ex-wife after claims emerged that the pair had continued their relationship in the early part of his second marriage to Frances, only for him to lift the restrictions when the details emerged online.
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The second marriage was, however, longer-lasting and financially highly productive. Frances, formerly a redundancy counsellor, became his manager, and was by all accounts a savvy operator. She was seen as the key player in persuading the BBC in 2007 to hand over 50% of a joint venture designed to exploit Top Gear commercially to Bedder 6, a production company set up by Clarkson with Andy Wilman, his old school friend and executive producer.
Clarkson continued to be financially acute after the couple divorced in 2014 following 21 years of marriage. On leaving the BBC, Amazon reportedly paid £160m for a three-season contract with the team of Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May for the motoring show, Grand Tour. Today, Clarkson owns a farm, a brewery and a pub, writes three newspaper columns and hosts the ITV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
With such fabulous levels of wealth, the idea of a political career for Clarkson has naturally popped up in the past, despite several brushes with career death (perhaps most seriously when a video emerged of him reciting the beginning of the children’s nursery rhyme “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” before apparently mumbling the rest of the rhyme, including the N-word). During William Hague’s leadership, the Conservative party chair Francis Maude suggested a collaboration with Clarkson. He had responded with utter fury then. “I cannot remember ever having been so angry,” he said at the time. “I am no Tory puppet … I am not even slightly interested in party politics.”
And Clarkson is not a well man. Apart from last month’s heart surgery, the photographer Harry Borden recently published a YouTube video in which he contrasted the “sweet and even vulnerable” Clarkson he captured two decades ago in his Bayswater flat over a glass of wine to the grump of today. “He has gone from big bird to an old camel struggling to even walk,” Borden said of a recent shoot of Clarkson for the Guardian Saturday magazine. “The Clarkson persona is not an act. He was curmudgeonly from start to finish.”
Berry said there were undoubtedly many people who felt Clarkson’s no-nonsense approach spoke to them, but that a reinvention as a politician seemed unlikely. “There is an argument that there isn’t a more successful broadcaster in the English speaking world than Jeremy Clarkson,” Berry said. “He comes into Top Gear on the BBC in the middle 80s. He’s on our screens right now. He’s never been off, and he has made every single thing he’s done turn to gold. He’s got a massive constituency out there of Collins and Dereks and Ians and Clydes … [But] I don’t think he would want to be a politician. It’s too boring – and there isn’t any money in it.”
