Why I love Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson Porsche 911 GT3 review | Driving - Times Online
Something strange is going on in this country. In the run-up to the general election David Cameron was constantly accused of being unfit for office because of his excellent education at Eton and Oxford. Isn’t that like suggesting an athlete should be barred from the British Olympic team because they are “too fast”?

It was much the same story with Nick Clegg. People loved him ... right up to the point when they learnt he had been educated at Westminster and Cambridge. Somehow, that immediately precluded him from being any good at anything. It’s hard, really, to understand what the critics are suggesting. Do they think that a fat and idiotic woman from Mansfield would make a better leader because she is thick? Or am I missing something?

And so it was with the vulgar subject of money. There was a time, not that long ago, when no one in this country ever spoke about how much anyone earned. I remember once being in a Swedish tank when all of a sudden the captain turned and asked: “Right. How much did you make last year?” I couldn’t have been more taken aback if he’d asked me how often I had anal sex.

Now, though, things are different. We are told, often, that the director-general of the BBC earns more than £800,000 and that this is an obscene amount of money. Right. I see. So what should he be paid? Half that? A quarter? Is £50,000 acceptable? To someone on the minimum wage, probably not.

Doubtless the bitter and the twisted looked at all those multi-millionaires in this newspaper’s recent Rich List and thought: “How can any one man possibly have a fortune of £1 billion?”

Why shouldn’t he? It is no skin off your nose. At the very least, you don’t have to sit next to him on a plane. And anyway, if the government took all his money away and distributed it evenly among the rest of the population, you’d be £16 richer and he’d be wondering why he spent his whole life working so damn hard.

He did. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that if you drive into London at 6am, half of the cars on the roads are Porsches and Astons. Whereas if you go in at ten to nine, they’re all Renaults. Simple solution, then. You want a nice car? Get up earlier and do more work.

This opinion no longer washes, though. I appear to be in a minority of one. People still want to be rich, but they don’t want anyone else to get there first

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