Bryony Gordon

Jeremy Clarkson’s back, and I blame Trump

Jeremy Clarkson was rewarded for his antics with a £10m contract

Good news, ladies and ladies: Jeremy Clarkson is back, back, back… although some might argue that he never really went away. Like most unreconstructed humans the world over, he was simply biding his time in the pub until the rest of us right-on, politically correct, liberal bed-wetters woke up to the error of our ways and gave up the good fight for equality, justice and the right to go to work without being boffed over the head by a boss off his man-tits on rosé wine. And hip, hip, hooray, that time is now!

See how he jet-skis back into the public eye, making jokes about gypsies and pleasuring horses (ho, ho, ho…). See how he cocks a snook at the silly, Lefty BBC, with its ethics and standards and paltry budgets. Clarkson (below) has been rewarded for his antics with a £10 million-a-year contract from one of the most powerful organisations on the planet!

Yes, this is the world we live in, people; one where the internet goes into meltdown because three middle-aged blokes have been paid ludicrous amounts of money to drive cars and blow things up.

Sorry if I sound humourless, like one of those tedious feminists. It’s just… well, I am one, and right now I feel like John Sims in Life on Mars, transported back to the early Seventies, surrounded by a bunch of right Gene Hunts.

It is somehow fitting that The Grand Tour should make its debut now, a week after Donald Trump grabbed the world by the p---y, a couple of days after he chose Steve Bannon – a man who uses the words “dykes” and “bimbos” to describe women – to be his new White House chief strategist. (Did anyone mention that Bannon helped build Breitbart, a popular online “news network” that has produced articles such as “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” and “Gay rights have made us dumber, it’s time to get back in the closet”?)

And I don’t want to get started on Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, but he has voted against a Bill for equal pay. Three times. And said he would consign Roe v Wade – which, in 1973, recognised a woman’s constitutional right to make her own medical decisions, including having an abortion without state interference – to “the ash-heap of history”.

Now, I’m not putting Jeremy Clarkson et al on the same lowly stool as Trump, Pence or Bannon – at least, the former Top Gear presenters aren’t trying to run a country while having their fun. But they do all seem to belong to that increasingly populous set of angry white men who are frothing with indignation because they’re not allowed to use derogatory words about other people, because they’ve got to start thinking about others’ feelings. And the only feelings that matter to the angry white men are their own. It upsets them that they are supposed to be tolerant of people from another religion, because approximately .006625 per cent of those people are extremists who want roughly the same thing they do – namely, to ensure everyone else lives by their rules.

Do you remember, in the Nineties, when everyone started going on about ‘‘new men’’? They were the ones who respected women as equals and used moisturiser. The new man was celebrated, until he upset the old men, who feared their rise might make their penises drop off. “We are becoming emasculated!” cried the old men. “We can no longer club a woman over the head and drag her back to our man caves, or call a spade a spade! We must rise up against this enemy within! We must not allow the likes of David Beckham to speak for us, because he has a silly squeaky voice!” And lo, Nigel Farage was born. So now we have the New Old Man, who can usually be seen with a Young Young Woman on his arm, or in a new new car that costs a whole lot of dollars. (Apparently, Amazon has spent £4.5 million on each episode of The Grand Tour.)

Meanwhile, when the defeated presidential candidate appears in public, the world gasps because she is not wearing make-up. Milo Yiannopoulous, a senior editor at Steve Bannon’s website, goes on Channel 4 and decries that America has been run for too long by feminists and groups such as Black Lives Matter. He says the wage gap does not exist, that campus rape culture is not real, and that all these things are just about making people think, about making them laugh. Because it’s funny, isn’t it, this undoing of decades of hard work?

Indeed, to a New Old Man, it must be absolutely hilarious to see that no matter what happens, you’re always the one who ends up on top.