In the most poignantly tardy change of heart since Salome hissed, “All right, pal, keep your hair on,” at John the Baptist’s twitching corpse, Jeremy Clarkson has unveiled himself as a champion of health and safety.
The genesis of this sensational volte face is a row over a disputed right of way (or, as he and his wife Frances see it, a grievous wrong of way) beside the Clarksons’ elegant, white-washed holiday home, replete with lighthouse, on the Isle of Man.
After rumbling for several years, the tensions over a 250-yard footpath on the Langness peninsula exploded this week when person or persons unknown removed a stretch of the cliff-top fence the Clarksons had erected to protect their privacy and threw it into the sea.
“We have been shocked and greatly saddened by the recent acts of criminal damage on our land,” declared the unhappy couple in a top-level joint communiqué. “Whoever ripped up the fence posts and gate protecting the cliff edge clearly had no thought for the safety of others.”
Ordinarily, the professional cliché-monger such as myself would cite this as a classic conversion on the road to Damascus. However, since even Jeremy at his most quixotic would be unlikely to drive a Maserati towards the Syrian capital at the minute, what with Mr Assad being in such a frightful bate, let’s instead laud him as that most beloved creature in all of heaven: he is the sinner that repenteth.
In the past, after all, the Top Gear knob’s attitude to the safety of others might be said to have flirted with the laissez-faire. He has, for example, boasted of driving a Bugatti across Europe at 240mph – an activity almost as hazardous, according to mainstream actuarial opinion, as ambling along a footpath at 2.4mph while trying to gawp at a bison-headed celebrity.
This is no time for flippancy. Criminal damage has been done, and not one of us would wish to condone that, or to play down the anguish it has caused. “I am,” reports Frances, “at the end of my tether.”
If some PC Brigadiers will think it a touch Neanderthal, even by Jeremy’s standards, to keep the missus in the garden tied to a rope, so be it. I prefer to congratulate him for protecting her in that goatly manner from straying towards, and possibly over, that newly unfenced path. Gallantry takes many forms, and in a studiedly unchivalrous age we must celebrate it wherever we may.
Besides, what consenting adults get up to on their own land is entirely their own business, which is pretty much the crux of the struggle between the Clarksons and the splendidly named pressure group PROWL (Public Rights of Way – Langness).
The PROWLERS, who deny any part in consigning the fence to Davy Jones’s locker, demand the permanent reopening of the path, which affords picturesque views of Jeremy’s kitchen. The matter is now headed for the High Court, since the Clarksons believe that their privacy is paramount. “The whole point of buying a house on the end of a peninsula,” says Jeremy, “is so that you get five minutes not being bothered.”
It will require the Judgment of Solomon to sort this one out, you fear. Indeed, the only solution may be chopping the land in two, with one half placed under a Nato-administered no-ramble zone, and the other ceded to a coalition of PROWL and local dog walkers, whose animals the Clarksons accuse of attacking their sheep and other creatures. That or a court order forcing Jeremy to buy some kitchen blinds.
Yet while no one will be entirely satisfied whatever the outcome, the person I pity most is Jeremy himself. The agony this internal conflict must be causing him lies beyond imagining. On the one hand, he glories in being the age’s leading advocate of the freedom to cause offence under the banner of doing what the hell you like. He might be the greatest English libertarian who ever lived. On the other, now that somebody has caused a fence of his to vanish, he finds himself shaking in outrage like a malaria victim out of quinine.
In the technical sense, this is a perfect paradigm of nimbyism, what with the trouble happening literally in his back yard. Yet I cannot and will not join in any vinegary Schadenfreude at the vision of the powerhouse who has won untold fame and fortune from relentlessly winding up just about everybody else on the planet being irritated beyond endurance himself by a bunch of herbivorous ramblers.
Anyway, that was the old, pre-persecution-by-PROWL, fool-injected Jeremy Clarkson. The new model, listed in my Auto Trader as the Lamborguineafowl Protector, is an altogether quieter and gentler machine – a hybrid of risk aversion and altruism styled loosely after the Prius, and devoted only to safeguarding others from such potentially fatal forms of transport as the languid constitutional along unfenced peninsular cliff.
Whether he will extend his concerns to launching a campaign to ban the island’s legendarily lethal TT motorcycle race (well over 200 deaths since its inception), time alone will tell. But the suspicion is that he certainly will; and that, come the autumn, the Isle of Man’s newly self‑appointed health and safety supremo will be patrolling local parks and playgrounds in the quest for renegade conkers.
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