With ten days to go until polling day, all signs point to a Conservative wipeout. In such tough times, celebrity support counts for all the more. And while few stars are lining up to snap selfies with Rishi Sunak, at least one is willing to take the fight to Labour. Step forward Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the nation’s most famous petrolhead, now reborn as the face of the farming community. The former Top Gear presenter has distinguished himself this campaign with several pointed interventions at the expense of the Starmer army.
First there was his response to Labour’s manifesto. After Sunak released a Twitter/X video last week decrying how it had just ’87 words’ to ‘say about British farming’, Clarkson replied to his 8 million followers ‘with him on that’. Then just a few days later, he penned his Saturday Sun column with the headline ‘I’m struggling to work out which way I should go at the election… but I’d rather vote for my dog than Keir Starmer.’ In a blistering section, Clarkson declared that:
Their manifesto contains just 87 words on farming. Which, when translated into English basically say: “We hate you, you meat-eating rural halfwits.” It’s even been suggested that inheritance tax will have to be paid on farm land. Which means that in about 20 years’ time, there will be no farm land. And therefore no food, apart from in all the town-centre, nuclear-free, South African peace stores, where you will be able to buy sustainable tofu. I get, of course, that people are fed up with the Tories, but I’d rather vote for my dog than Sir Starmer’s merry bunch of ideological nincompoops.
Ouch. It also suggested that ‘half of’ Labour ‘don’t know what a woman is’ and that Starmer’s party believes that ‘if you work hard all your life and make some savings to tide you over in your old age, those savings are theirs and that they should be given to people who haven’t worked at all.’ It ended with the Clarkson’s Farm star concluding ‘Come polling day, I’m praying there’s a box on the ballot paper which says: “Anyone but Labour.”’
Perhaps his old mate Lord Cameron had a quiet word?
Comments