Monday 30 November 2009



From The Sunday Times
November 8, 2009

Get me a rope before Mandelson wipes us all out

Jeremy Clarkson

I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.

He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt onto in the meantime.

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist. And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson- skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.

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YOUR COMMENTS

225 Comments

(Displaying 1-10)

James Makepeace wrote:
I have never liked Clarkson ! Always seemed a loud-mouthed oaf to me... but for his latest Tour de Force on Mandelson and the unforgiveable mess to wich he and his like have driven us (while soaking up treasure, power and peerages)... Clarkson is entirely forgiven his oafish awfulness.
I have always cared about free speech and Clarkson's latest masterpiece reminds us all that, awful though it may be, the time comes when we need it... to defend us against the sinister excesses of such evil people as Mandelson is widely believed to be by the beleagured people of Great Britain.
I wonder if there has been any attempt by the "dark puppet-master" to have the article removed... or Clarkson "reined in" ! Keep it up Jeremy... you are forgiven ... indeed, were you to form a new party and stand at the next election you might actually end up facing the decision of a career change... from poacher to gamekeeper !
November 27, 2009 4:13 PM GMT
Dee Engine wrote:
It seems to me that Mr Clarkson has hit the nail on the head. People are fed up with the way this corrupt government has been running this country.

We have a high proportion of people who were never elected in positions of power, Mandelson is one Baroness Scotland is another and Alan Sugar is a third. These people are a disgrace, and Jeremy Clarkson is at least speaking his mind and not hiding behind some excuse of a title.

What I am at a loss to understand is why in by-elections that have been held recently, Labour have been returned to power, it's seems strange to me that a party that is down on it's uppers can get a a massive increase in postal votes supporting it!

There wouldn't be any chance of vote rigging would there?

Like it or not Jeremy Clarkson speaks his mind.
November 27, 2009 9:56 GMT
Martyn Webster wrote:
I could not agree more to this article!
To me, it is what the majority of the "Great" British people think and feel.
I have been in my job for 12 years, quite a feat in this day and age, but lately I am now in the minority of english people that work there!
As for moving abroad, my dad retired to the Costa Del Sol 12 years ago (no, you dont have to rob a train to get there!) he said he does not miss the UK atall, only his relatives there live there still.
I was there for a week last month, and what a refreshing change it was from being in this hole of a country!!
November 27, 2009 9:34 GMT
TIna Thatcher wrote:
Jeremy,
Just wait until your kids have graduated, you have spent close to £xxxxxxxx educating them, getting them through uni and their only option is working for FREE as an intern for the next hundred years! Also they can't claim Job seekers allowance doing this UNPAID work as they are not ACTIVELY SEEKING and anyway, they have a degree so they will be advantaged over every other work shy, benefit seeker currently queuing up for a very nice FREE £260 per month!!!!
November 27, 2009 5:35 GMT
John White wrote:
The country is in a state because decent people run away from the government instead of dragging them out of their offices by their ties/hair.
November 26, 2009 3:59 PM GMT
Cristina C wrote:
Interesting to hear the reasoning for not emigrating echoed even across the pond. Everyone I know wants to move to New Zealand and raise sheep. I wish they'd vote instead.
November 26, 2009 2:44 PM GMT
Alexander W. Thomas wrote:
After reading all these comments, I can only come to one conclusion: Britain urgently needs a new party that strongly differs from the established ones. One this party comes to power, it needs to give Britain a constitution (which of course should only be enacted after a referendum), which should protect the citizens of Britain from governmental privacy invasion, stupid wars on freedoms (like the freedom to smoke, eat, drink or drive whatever I want), and other oppressive measures the EU and it's national governments are imposing on their citizens (the bad guys know their way around those regulations anyway). This constitution should be impossible to change without a referendum, and should limit the powers the government can surrender to the EU. Regarding the search for a country worth living: take a look at Holland or Germany; the vast majority of Dutchmen for example speak English and in Germany you have more burocrats but on the other hand less governmental privacy invasion than in the UK. The only problem with these countries is that they're in the EU, so sooner or later these countries will have the same problems as GB. It's not the immigrants fault that England has these problems though, it's the governments fault (and the fault of those who voted for the government; you have to be a UK citizen/subject to participate in English general elections as far as I know). Of course, Brown's reign of terror is an exception to the rule that poor government is the voters fault, as his government has about as much democratic legitimation as the EU has.
November 26, 2009 2:07 PM GMT
James Harvey wrote:
The kind of article that you wish everyone had gotten the chance to read

Hopefully the next generation of parliamentary figures will have enough character to turn around to their old fart mentors and 'idols' and say 'You know what? You made England a pain in the arse to live in, we're going to do it my way'. At least, here's hoping.

I'm sick of turning on the TV and finding the government have done yet another thing which makes me say 'why would you do that, it was fine before...now you've made it awful', really puts a downer on the day.
November 25, 2009 7:36 PM GMT
alex festivalhalle wrote:
"I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache"
This from the man who rocks the naffest blue jeans and proto-mullet combination currently on television!

Totally all over the place as a piece however... 
"It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson- skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else."

This paragraph makes no sense at all! we aren't carbon neutral (not even close), mosque-drenched (does JC live in Southall? I doubt it!), Fairtrade is an aspect of global economics not specific to UK, not even mandated nationally, "trendily left" (has he read any recent opinion polls?), trilingual (meaning English, Welsh and Gaelic - this is news?), "property-is-theft" (some remind me of when the anarchist cookbook was enacted into law?)... etc etc.

It reads like it was written by Microsoft Word's paperclip "You seem to be writing a standard 'isn't the world going to sh*t rant-piece for the Times or Mail. Would you like some help?'" ;-)
November 25, 2009 12:50 PM GMT
David P wrote:
In my experience, intelligent people move to France. I moved to France. I rest my valise.
November 23, 2009 2:04 PM GMT
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