The blokey, fraudulent cult of Jezza
Clarkson represents the worst of boorish ’80s materialism, writes Tim Stanley
ZAYN Malik gone, Jeremy Clarkson gone — it’s like the Twilight of the Gods. Except Zayn’s a sort of Orpheus and Jezza is Bacchus poured into a pair of jeans. Also, Zayn will actually be missed.
There’s a presumption that all conservatives worship Clarkson, but the cult is far smaller than you might think. The problem with Jezza is the kind of conservatism that he represents: ’80s conservatism that was all about buying stuff and boring people at dinner about what you’ve just bought.
I grew up in the early days of Top Gear and there was only one telly in the house — so when Dad wanted to watch Jezza rip the mickey out of Rover, you had to watch it with him. Jezza was considered a menopausal joke even back then. (How old is he now, 124?) But the show still had pretentions to being a real consumer programme that stood up for the little guy against the spivs who sold you crap.
When boredom and curiosity returned me to Top Gear in the late noughties, I discovered that it had changed, man, changed.
Now it featured a bunch of men standing around in a warehouse listening to other men talk about foreigners and how hilarious they are.
Then Jezza would drive a really expensive car around a bit. Then a celebrity would drive a rubbish car around a race track. It was the cult of Jezza, a cult that is materialistic and brash and a celebration of loadsamoney being spent on Big Bad Toys for Big Fat Boys. This isn’t conservatism, it’s libertarian- ism: money, money, money.
Now, if Jezza, James May, and the homunculus Richard Hammond were honest about the “I couldn’t help but notice that I’ve got more money than yaw” ethic they embody, then that would be one thing. But we live in an odd age when our populist heroes are no longer poor or radical but rich and reactionary. In this paradoxical epoch, Jezza became a “blue collar” hero — a representation of the everyman.
This is very irritating. As someone who struggles to pay their bills, I can’t help but feel that Clarkson no more speaks for me than he does the island population of Vanuatu. He might talk like a Thatcherite but he actually went to public school and his mother claims to have helped design Paddington Bear. Stig, the name of his anonymous racing driver, is also the term used for new boys at his old school.
The Clarkson brand is a fraud — and anyone who claims he somehow represents workingclass conservatives who are locked out of power in modern Britain is deluding themselves.
He is upper middle-class and obscenely rich: he just happens to give a good impression of a mouthy docker.
Oh, and one final irony is that he made a great deal of money working for the BBC — a sup- posed bastion of left-wingery. We’ve helped pay to send him around the world to drive on the wrong side of the road. Doesn’t seem so funny when you put it like that, does it?
Like a god, Clarkson believed that he operated beyond human laws. Hence, if he got hungry then he was within his rights to punch someone about it and call them a lazy Irish something-orother (the Irish half of me got angry at that, the English half told me to calm down).
That this should be the reason why he would eventually meet his Götterdämmerung is entirely right and just. For years, Jezza has embodied the consumerist values of a society that treats people as a commodity — so who is surprised that he would turn on the servants?
For the present, his followers mourn the end of a populist hero — but upon sober reflection they might find him to have been a golden calf. And we know what they’re full of.
Zayn, however, I expect to see resurrected in glory — as the best-looking supermarket stacker in Bradford. Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.timeslive.co.za
He is obscenely rich: he just happens to give a good impression of a mouthy docker