Clarkson's pielady - Sunday Times

[Paul Boote]

Seems to have a good arm. England Ladies Cricket Team material...?

 

 

Sunday Times, 18th September 2005

 

Take that, Motor Mouth

 

Jeremy Clarkson was attacked by a green protester last week. He remains unrepentant while his assailant tells John-Paul Flintoff the petrolhead had it coming

 

 

Naturally, Jeremy Clarkson had expected some kind of attack. Addressing an assembly of engineering students at Oxford Brookes University last week, he began: “I fully expected to be speaking to you today covered in flour and eggs, like a giant human pancake.”

 

The Sunday Times columnist and presenter of BBC2’s Top Gear had come to collect an honorary degree, awarded in recognition of his long-standing support for engineering. Only after his speech finished was his dire prediction fulfilled — give or take the odd ingredient — by a woman named Rebecca Lush.

 

Clarkson had disappeared into a marquee, Lush recalls. “But then he came out again, so I ran after him.” Catching up, she leapt high into the air and copped the motoring writer of the year in the face with a homemade, organic banana meringue. In case you imagined otherwise, that’s not as easy as it sounds: “He’s a bloody huge guy, 6ft 4in. Hitting him in the face was like playing basketball.”

 

Having completed her mission, Lush, 33, kept moving. “I had to run very fast from a security guard. I don’t know what you can be charged with, legally, for putting a pie on someone — and I had no idea what Clarkson might do.”

 

In the event, Clarkson’s response was generous. He congratulated his assailant: “Great shot!” The only criticism he offered, while the assembled photographers happily snapped away, was to state that the meringue tasted too sweet.

 

“It’s unfortunate that I was terribly jet-lagged,” he says now. “Otherwise I would have guessed that something was up when the photographers said, ‘Would you mind stepping over there, because the light is better?’ They knew what was going on. And I have to say that, at the PR level, it was a fantastic result for the environmentalists. One-nil to them.”

 

But how did it come to this? Why has Clarkson, who brings joy to so many, become the bête noire of the environmental movement? Why did thousands sign a petition urging Oxford Brookes to withdraw the honour? And what motivated this particular woman to do more than sign up — to bake a banana meringue and convey it far from home to sully the face and robes of a man she’d never met?

 

Clarkson was nominated for supporting high standards in engineering — something he showed most notably by championing Brunel as the greatest Briton in the BBC series in 2002; and, as a passenger on the last BA Concorde flight a year later, by paraphrasing Neil Armstrong to describe the retirement of that engineering classic: “This is one small step for a man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind.”

 

But his work has also earned him the ire of the green movement. On Top Gear, Clarkson drove through virgin peat bogs in a 4x4 and tore up road safety information on camera. Racing against colleagues, he drove a Ferrari more or less nonstop from London to Switzerland and was stopped by police for speeding. And in February this year the BBC paid £250 in compensation to a parish council in Somerset after Clarkson deliberately rammed a Toyota pick-up into a 30-year-old horse chestnut.

 

Clarkson is unrepentant. “The parish council is funded by central government, which is funded by me, so it’s my tree. Anyway, there was no damage.”

 

Environmentalists believe that what Clarkson says and does on screen encourages others to copy him. He recently vowed to kill cyclists “for fun” if they failed to respect the Highway Code — a promise that has provoked furious debate on the pages of cycling magazines and websites.

 

But Clarkson refuses to accept that he’s a role model. “When people say that to me, I ask, ‘Would you do something just because I did it?’ And they always say no. And I say, ‘Well, if you wouldn’t, then why do you think someone else would?’ ”

 

All the same, the environmental pressure group Transport 2000 said the decision to honour Clarkson at a serious academic institution was like Scotland Yard paying tribute to the work of Inspector Clouseau. And more than 3,100 people signed that petition: not only environmentalists and members of Oxford council but also staff and students at Oxford Brookes, and workers at the nearby Cowley BMW factory who are angry at his repeated criticism of their former colleagues at MG Rover, which is in administration.

 

In Lush, Clarkson was confronted by someone whose obsession with cars, though less well known than his, has been no less consuming. The main difference between them is that Clarkson loves motors and Lush hates them.

 

In 1993 Lush was jailed for four months for her part in protests against road building on Twyford Down. “It wasn’t nice. But the support we got was incredible. It was the first time environmental activists had been sent to prison, and it really inspired people. I received 100 letters a day,” she says.

 

Her motivation has always been climate change. “I love the countryside and I love nature, but I don’t see global warming as a countryside thing. It’s about the survival of our species. It’s about people. And transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.”

Like many activists, Lush eased off after Labour came to power in 1997. “We stepped back because we had won. Labour came to power and said, ‘No more roads’. And John Prescott set up his commission for integrated transport.” So she moved into campaigning against genetically modified crops and got a job driving a bus.

 

But about the time of the fuel protests of 2000, the government seemed to change its mind on transport issues, and Lush became active again. She set up an anti-roads alliance, Road Block, and began chucking pies. She put one in the face of the American envoy to the environmental talks at the Hague and another on the transport secretary, Alistair Darling.

 

More recently, she chained herself to a digger for more than two hours before a specialist team removed her. And she reduced to chaos a meeting to discuss the planned Thames Gateway bridge public inquiry by snatching the inspector’s microphone and shouting, as she was chased around a table: “This is a scandal. The bridge is being railroaded through. You are not listening.”

 

Isn’t this childish? Not at all, she insists. “You grab attention through direct action. I don’t think people would have thought about these issues otherwise. Direct action is about making people think, ‘Why is that woman doing that?’ People thought we were weird, in 1992, to risk our lives by standing in front of bulldozers. But environmentalists are always putting out messages that we’re derided for until, 10 to 15 years later, the ideas have become mainstream.”

 

With some pride, she adds that Lord Hoffmann, an appeal judge, told her in the early 1990s that “civil disobedience in this country is an honourable tradition, and those who take part in it may be vindicated by history”. (All the same, he rejected her appeal against imprisonment.)

 

Having dispatched Clarkson, Lush prepared to tackle other prominent petrolheads: the fuel protesters. “They are ignorant of basic economics. The government has bent over backwards for them since 2000 by not increasing fuel duty at all. They’re in the Dark Ages. They have to face the reality that fuel prices are going up. That’s not a radical statement, it’s what the AA and the RAC are saying.”

 

And what about Clarkson? Will he ever be reconciled with the greens? “I don’t want to be their bête noire,” he insists. “I want to be the champion of ordinary people — who seem to be lectured to all the time. Look, there are two sides to the argument. I do listen, constantly, to their side of the argument. And every time they’re presented with my side, they shove pies in my face.”

 

Not literally, of course, but here’s what he means: “I went on Jeremy Vine’s radio show to discuss some aspect of the environment and they had the environmentalist George Monbiot on, and he said, on air, that if I liked 4x4s it must be because my penis is small! He sent me a letter afterwards apologising for getting carried away, but that’s the level of debate.

 

“They get together to discuss things, these people, eating their nuclear-free peace nibbles, and they’re just never exposed to the other side of the argument. They say, ‘We live in Hackney and we think such-and-such a thing is wrong’. And that’s it.

 

“There is no doubt that we will all have to subscribe to their views, eventually. In fact, to judge by the pie incident, the time has already passed.”

 

 

THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD CARE, JEREMY

 

When I landed that pie on Jeremy Clarkson’s smug, self-satisfied face I could almost hear the cheers resounding around the country.

 

When the text messages and e-mails started arriving they confirmed how much joy I had caused. Just deserts for Clarkson was the theme.

 

In fact, it wasn’t any ordinary pie. It was a fair trade organic home-baked banana meringue, chosen because I knew that every politically correct element of it would irritate Motor Mouth all the more.

 

His childish and sexist response — calling me “premenstrual” and an “angry bird” — insults that, like him, hark back to the 1970s, show how outdated Clarkson and his values really are.

 

What he has discovered is that the environmental movement has a sense of humour too — but a very different one from his. And what has been clear to most of us in that movement is that Clarkson needed bringing down a peg or two.

 

The environmental movement has many detractors, and none of us would argue that we should be exempt from criticism, but recently his attacks have gone beyond fair comment and are edging dangerously close to incitement to kill.

 

Take, for example, his tasteless comments after the terrorist attacks in London, when thousands of people took to cycling. In comments in The Sun, he said he would run down “for fun” cyclists who cruise through red lights. I dread that one of his fans will one day take him seriously.

 

Then there’s his attitude to climate change. In January this year he wrote: “Of course, there is no doubt that the world is warming up, but let’s just stop and think for a moment what the consequences might be.

 

“Switzerland loses its skiing resorts? The beach in Miami is washed away? North Carolina gets knocked over by a hurricane? Anything bothering you yet? . . . It isn’t even worthy of a shrug.”

 

Well, it wasn’t North Carolina, it was New Orleans. And if the scientists are right, there could be many more like it.

 

Of course, Clarkson has every right to make an idiot of himself in the media, and he does it with panache. The problem is the opposite point of view gets heard much less often.

 

Let me explain why we should care about climate change. Jeremy is right to point out that other people will be affected by it before we will: it threatens to throw the world into food deficit by 2030, creating a humanitarian disaster in Africa and south Asia. Anything bothering you yet?

 

When I became an eco-activist at Twyford Down in the first days of the anti-roads movement in 1992, I was motivated by my fear about climate change. We were 10 years ahead of our time. At last climate change is recognised in the words of Tony Blair as the “most serious threat to mankind”.

 

Clarkson was rewarded by Oxford Brookes for services to engineering. In his view, engineering and environment are opposites. But climate change can be tackled only with the help of better engineering and new technologies. Everyone seems to have twigged this, except Jeremy and Oxford Brookes.

 

Clarkson’s pie was awarded for services to public ignorance. Next on my list? Well, I’m still baking.

 

Rebecca Lush

[Sportsman]

Self satisfied tree hugger :mad:

Could, and should be charged with common assault.

BTW, I drive a 4litre 4X4, have 2 other cars and can't remember the last time I caught a bus

[Paul Boote]

Sportsman:

Self satisfied tree hugger :mad:

Could, and should be charged with common assault.

BTW, I drive a 4litre 4X4, have 2 other cars and can't remember the last time I caught a bus

Self-satisfied petrolhead...? :mad:

[Elton]

Sportsman:

 

Could, and should be charged with common assault.

Yep. Just because you disagree with somebody, it doesn't give you the right to assault them.

[jeepster]

i'm with you on that sportsman.

[Paul Boote]

"Poop poop."

 

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/tocce...6&division=div1

[pinky]

yep she should be charged with assault,poor jeremy.

[spangles]

I just read his book, had me in tears all the way thru, he was likened to Marmite a few years ago, you either love him or hate him. Dave

[Sportsman]

Self-satisfied petrolhead...? [Mad]

 

Not really Paul,I just wanted to show what side of the fence I was sitting on. We don't have any buses, the nearest train station is 120 mile round trip, the nearest supermarket is 60 mile round trip and we are likely to have snow from October through till May, so while your busy saving the planet, I'm busy trying to live on it.

A bit of global warming wouldn't go amiss up here sometimes

With 3 people in the house who have places to go,having 3 vehicles is not a luxury.

BTW Jeepster, I love the Explorer

BTW Paul, Love the Wind in the Willows, one of my favourites. It's a long held ambition realised to be likened to Toad

 

I wonder what would have happened if Jeremy Clarkson had hit her in the face. Do you think she would respond with "good shot" or call the Police, crying like a baby.

 

[ 18. September 2005, 10:12 PM: Message edited by: Sportsman ]

[jeepster]

sportsman, have you noticed that the fuel gauge on the explorer is, at best, totally inaccurate?

 

i also would give anything to be compared to mr toad, alan clark, who always has been, and always will be, my favourite politician was a proper petrol head and he loved it when people compared him to old mr toad. anyone interested in cars should check out 'backfire' a collection of his writings over the years. tree huggers and paul boote need not apply, i don't think you'd get it.