I’ll take Jeremy Clarkson over a howling mob any day

Perhaps it’s a glaring and personal flaw in my observational skills, but if somebody tried to insult me via a number plate attached to their car, I’m not at all sure I’d notice. I suppose if it was really obvious — ‘HUGO TWAT’ sort of thing — then the synapses would fire, but anything more subtle would pass me by. And I don’t think it’s just me.

Imagine, for example, driving through Scotland in a car with the registration ‘H746 CLN’. How likely is it, do you think, that some super-observant thug would interpret this as a reference to the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and then gather together a posse to beat you up? ‘Come on lads! There’s some English git down there obliquely making an appalling joke about us losing a war!’ And nobody saying, at any point, ‘But I dinnae get it, Davie. Whit’s the H for?’

Wouldn’t happen. Would it? Yet this, pretty much, seems to be the official — and proud — Argentine interpretation of whatever curious disaster befell Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Top Gear crew while filming a Christmas special in Tierra del Fuego six weeks ago. It’s a complex tale, this, with more twists and turns than an episode of The Killing. The undisputed facts seem to be that Clarkson, along with the usual Top Gear team (this being one who looks like Clarkson and the other one) pitched up in a car with the number plate ‘H982 FKL’.

This was widely interpreted as a nod to the Falklands conflict, and they were thus hounded out of town. And a month and a half later, people are still cross about it. ‘Jeremy Clarkson is an embarrassment to the British people,’ Argentina’s ambassador, Alicia Castro, told the Telegraph this week.