Clarkson!

Picture: Amazon

Sometimes in the culture wars, events contrive to create the perfect storm. In the case of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Harry and Meghan, to you and me - the storm is a permanent state of enragement, much like that giant red cyclone near the equator of Jupiter.

For one newspaper in particular - obviously, the Daily Mail - it is ever-present. On any given day there are four or five stories about Harry, or Meghan, or both. At the height of the furore over Harry’s memoir Spare, you’d be lucky to find coverage of anything else. In recent days, though, the Mail’s apparent obsession with the Sussexes has died down to just four or five new stories a day. That, though, is still tempered by an injection of beatific pieces about Harry’s brother and sister-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It has been a prominent feature of the British media's editorial polarity that picture stories of the ever-smiling Catherine, her heir-to-the-throne husband and their adorable children get prominence in contrast to the prevailingly negative coverage of Harry and Meghan. Don’t tell me there isn’t an agenda going on there…

Back in December, before Spare came out, and in the wake of the royal couple’s exorcising Netflix series, Jeremy Clarkson stuck his size 14s in by writing a wholly offensive column for The Sun in which he suggested that Meghan should be paraded naked through the streets of Britain while having excrement flung at her by the public. He wasn't, to the best of anyone's knowledge, being literal, but in that oh-so Clarksonesque way, it was a clumsy reference to a scene from Game Of Thrones with which to emphasise the “hate” - his word – he had for the duchess “on a cellular level”. To hammer home his disdain, Clarkson placed the duchess above Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and even serial killer Rose West. Needless to say, the shit-slinging idea went down well with people on Twitter called “Daz” or “Barry” who suffix their handles with Cross of St. George flags, and whose timelines are regularly peppered with sentiment supportive of topics such as Brexit, defunding the BBC and bringing back Boris. Basically, anything starting with the letter b. 

This is the Clarkson fan base: ‘real blokes’ who like cars, football and probably still bemoan the disappearance of The Sun’s Page Three “stunnah”, which was, of course, always only “a bit of fun” and in no way a daily dose of sexist titillation (with the emphasis on “tit” – phwoar!). These are the self-styled anti-woke warriors, who feed - and feed off - the Daily Mail’s constant chuntering about anything remotely liberal, contriving a culture war angle out of anything. So, far from merely tolerating his occasional sexism and casual racism on Top Gear, Clarkson’s core demographic have fully bought into his reactionary schtick. Which means the egregious column he wrote in December was probably regarded by most of his following as grist to the mill.

Not so, everyone else. Within a matter of days the column had attracted a record 25,000 complaints to the press regulator Ipso. As a pile-on ensued, an apparently chastened Clarkson tweeted: “Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game Of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.” 

It wasn’t enough. Even to his daughter Emily. “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those that are targeted with online hatred.”

The broad view agreed. Clarkson senior had been deeply misogynist. Questions were asked of the editorial governance at The Sun to have allowed the column to have run in the first place, with former Sun editor Neil Wallis calling it a “dreadful failure of editing.” Immediately, questions arose as to the reputational damage Clarkson had done to the broadcasters who employ him, although while Kevin Lygo, ITV’s media and entertainment boss, described the column as “awful”, he said there were no plans to replace him as presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Amazon, which has paid Clarkson several millions to front the son-of-Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the reality series Clarkson’s Farm, was less ambiguous. Described by Clarkson himself as “incandescent” over The Sun piece, the streaming service was reported by entertainment industry trade rag Variety as “cutting their ties” with the controversial presenter. This, in turn, set off the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers who predictably accused those offended by Clarkson of ‘cancelling’ the 62-year-old manchild. Except that he hasn’t, yet.

In fact, the Variety story said that it was only “likely” that Amazon would part ways with Clarkson, and following “the conclusion of existing agreements.” Those include one more series of The Grand Tour and two of Clarkson’s Farm. That will mean Clarkson remains onscreen with Amazon for at least the next two years. But, as we know with the tabloids’ obsession with woke-bashing, don’t let such practicalities get in the way of a good story.

Amazon has remained quiet on Clarkson’s future, although a “senior figure” connected with the company told the Telegraph that such talk of the presenter being cancelled because of his column in The Sun was “nonsense”. Another pointed out that Clarkson’s brand of gobshite controversy was hardly in the same league of offence-causing as some of the books Amazon sells, like Mein Kampf, or documentary series on Prime about serial killers. Actually, the storm only emboldens Clarkson’s brand. Ever since he started using strained metaphors in the ‘old’ Top Gear about cars “snapping knicker elastic”, he knowingly self-cultivated an image of being television’s actual Alan B’Stard, who comes out with mildly reactionary things just to get a rise. Boo!

It worked. Top Gear 2.0, with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, became a juvenile version of Last Of The Summer Wine, pushing the tolerance envelope with obviously scripted routines that portrayed the trio as a group of overgrown schoolboys, rather than middle-aged motoring journalists. That was until the “slope” reference in a film the trio made in Thailand which was, we were assured, a statement about a camera angle. I don’t think the Thai gentleman in shot would have been amusedThe last straw, for the BBC, at least, came with Clarkson being sacked for punching a Top Gear producer while on location after being told that the crew’s hotel couldn’t prepare a late night steak for him.

Picture: Amazon

Thus, Amazon spent £160 million on luring Clarkson & Co over to Prime to develop The Grand Tour which was, blatantly, Top Gear 2.5. Same presenters, same schtick, same demographic. Except – and this gets to the bottom of Amazon’s possible tie-cutting - the blokeish Clarkson/May/Hammond humour is intrinsically British and, even then, quite narrow. The Telegraph revealed this week that Prime has around 200 million viewers worldwide, with three-quarters of them in America. In Britain, where The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm will more or less exclusively resonate, Amazon can only command 12 million subscribers. All of a sudden, £160 million seems an awful lot of money. As the GT trio found with old-TG, their form of irony doesn’t always work in America. Clarkson’s Farm, too, is probably regarded as parochial (even though it is, actually, genuinely entertaining), but US ratings for it have been particularly poor. And with any poorly performing TV property, if it doesn’t rate, it gets the chop.

The beginning-of-the end for Clarkson on Amazon is, then, pure coincidence. But that won’t keep him out of the headlines. Last week it was revealed that he e-mailed Prince Harry on Christmas Day to apologise for his Sun column, saying that his language had been “disgraceful” and he was “profoundly sorry”. A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan were less than impressed: “While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny. Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’ [as he apparently stated] it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”

Clarkson has, of course, not been cancelled. He will continue presenting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on ITV - for now - though the network has not confirmed anything more than another series. The Sun still employs him, though his columns have been conspicuously absent, and he still has a weekly appearance in The Sunday Times. So, no, the enfante terrible hasn’t succumbed to the tofu-eating wokerati. But maybe a period of abstinence - not just by Clarkson but the rest of the reactionary commentariat constantly searching for a new club to break over Harry and Meghan’s heads - might do us all some good.

Queasy like Sunday morning

Not being equipped with the brain cells for it, I rarely stray into politics on either this blog or social media. Actually, my intellectual heft - or lack of it - doesn’t really come into it: such is the No Man’s Land of embittered trench warfare these days that it’s rarely worth the blood pressure spikes expressing an opinion on anything. But the matter of Matt Hancock’s office indiscretion has left me properly batey, and on many levels.

Firstly, I get it that someone’s private life should be just that, private, and it doesn’t matter what moralistic view you take on the now-former Health Secretary’s affair with Gina Coladangelo, essentially wrecking two families and destroying two marriages in the process. But, as has been frequently stated over the last 48 hours, in times of crisis, we look to leadership, especially when that leadership is setting the rules about what we can and cannot do. So when that same leadership breaks those rules - and flagrantly so - we’ve got a perfect right as villagers to come out shouting, brandishing our pitchforks in a bloodthirsty manner.

I’ve not lost a close relative to Covid-19, but my girlfriend has - her stepfather, who lived with her mother in Spain, enjoying their retirement in a warmer clime. When his death came, only two members of the extended family could fly out to the funeral (which we attended via Zoom). To date, my partner hasn’t been able to hug or even be in the same country as her widowed mother. These are the sacrifices we’ve all been forced to endure over the last 15 months. The same sacrifices that meant I had to stand on my own 91-year-old mother’s doorstep for months on end, waving at her from two metres like friends separated by the Berlin Wall. 

So forgive me for getting all preachy about it, but Hancock, in snogging his mistress in the office as if sneaking off from the Christmas party for hanky-panky over the photocopier, deserves no sympathy or given a bye on the basis that ‘humans are humans’. I get it. Times of crisis, and the proximity that comes from spending long working days together, followed by the “who fancies a quick drink over the road” will lead to office romances. It has happened to me and it may well have happened to you. The difference is that in my case, we were both single at the time and, secondly, not responsible for imposing the most stringent restrictions on social engagement since The Blitz. And therein lies the crux of our ire over Hancock, who was unable to keep it in his pants while telling every else to.

I’ve always found Hancock a politician - amongst many - who seemed rather too pleased with himself. When Theresa May appointed him Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in 2018, he took it upon himself to demonstrate tech savviness by launching his own smartphone app. “Hi - I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app,” he trilled on the opening screen, before inviting users to enter an apparently un-needed tool to showcase what the politician was getting up to, in his professional life, of course. “A chance to find out what's going on, both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary, and most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.” Perhaps, now, we know too much.

Just a few months after being appointed to the culture brief, the 39-year-old Hancock was made health secretary, a role which, when May herself resigned, gave him the ambition for even higher office, unsuccessfully contending the Tory leadership that put in power Boris Johnson who, as we all know, has had a problem with marital fidelity all of his own. It could, then, be said that Hancock was in the right place at the wrong time when the pandemic erupted. And, as the many wartime analogies have compared, there are few rulebooks that can be followed in times of real national crisis. But if there’s one thing that has run through Hancock’s political career - and the app episode exemplified - it’s breathtaking hubris. 

On Friday, after The Sun had broken its front page story of Hancock’s “steamy clinch” with Ms. Coladangelo, the line being put out was that his priority was driving the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and getting the country back to normality. This was the same line that Hancock brazenly used to deflect attention when Dominic Cummings’ explosive spleen-venting during the Commons Health Select Committee revealed accusations of “15 or 20 occasions” when “Hancock” (always just that) should have been sacked for failures in the early weeks of the crisis. When Cummings published the infamous WhatsApp screenshot of Johnson apparently calling his health secretary “fucking hopeless”, Hancock continued to style it out with his insistence that he has the country to save.

Even yesterday, in his resignation video, Hancock chose to spend more time alluding to the great work of the department he ran, than apologising to his wife for the humiliation he had caused her. Body language experts have noted how his lengthy tribute to the NHS seemed more to do with reinforcing his political credentials for a future comeback than acknowledgement of what he’d done. “There is still an air of arrogance in his words, though, as he tells us ‘This is why I’ve got to resign’,” said social behaviourist Judi James, pointing out that he appeared to be “steering us to what he sees as the sole problem in his behaviour, rather than addressing what the public might see as a matter of disapproval.”

There was something somewhat crooked about the way Hancock had, last year, set a seemingly impossible target of achieving 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April, which he apparently did before the number plunged dramatically again soon after. It was one of the charges laid at Hancock during Cummings’ explosive testimony. “In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely, because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.” The veracity of all of Cummings’ claims remain to be fully verified, but the accusations over PPE procurement, care homes and even, today in the Sunday Times, allegations that Hancock used his private e-mail account for official government business in breach of strict transparency rules, all start pointing to a “narcissistic and slippery health secretary”, as one source described him to the same newspaper’s Tim Shipman.

No doubt, as with all the political turbulence surrounding Boris Johnson’s government in recent weeks - notably his own travails involving wallpaper and his now-wife’s influence - much of this chatter about Hancock’s conduct will get brushed off by the spin machine as Westminster “rough-and-tumble”. It has, though, become far too easy to just dismiss sleaze as of interest only to the wonks who report on such stuff from within the SW1 bubble. Johnson himself was said to be reluctant to sack Hancock on Friday, and even in accepting his health secretary’s resignation yesterday he gave a glowing endorsement of the minister’s achievements, concluding: “Your contribution to public service is far from over,” depressingly hinting at some sort of return - the equivalent of saying “lay low for 12 months, son, we’ll come and get you when this is all over”. 

Johnson doesn’t do sackings, largely because he abhors being told what to do by the very press he, as a former journalist, was once a part of. Another theory is that Boris has assembled such a lightweight Cabinet that any changes are an admission of his own failure of leadership. With such anaemic opposition at the moment, Johnson can probably afford to let Hancock’s departure go without too much exposure, especially while he still has inadequates like Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Grant Shapps on his front bench to act as lightning conductors. The problem for Johnson is that each episode that he manages to brush off - as Hancock had done - as Westminster life erodes from within. The wisdom is that Johnson’s premiership is somewhat Teflon-coated because of the vaccine rollout, but there are signs of exasperation within his own party that the gaffes and own goals are, like coastal erosion, gradual and mostly invisible, but could prove problematic down the line. On Friday, Johnson was backing Hancock, saying that his health secretary had apologised and that the matter was then “closed”. Yesterday, however, that support started to disappear from within the cabinet and the parliamentary Conservative party, in a manner that didn’t even occur when Cummings himself scored an enormous reputational own goal for the coronavirus response by driving his family to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.

Friday’s front-page splash by The Sun detailing Hancock’s extra-marital relationship with the now famous “Hands. Face. Arse.” CCTV image couldn’t have had worse - or better - timing, depending on your point of view. A story breaking like that on a Friday leaves the weekend open for it to deepen, and thus it did, with the Sunday papers today diving queasily into forensic detail of Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo, not only examining the legalities of their encounters during lockdown, but even on just how long the relationship had been going no for, how she became a director on the Department of Health & Social Care’s board, how she was sponsored for a House of Commons security pass, and even the fact her brother’s company enjoys a lucrative contract as a supplier of services to the NHS. Coming on top of other allegations about Hancock’s matey network - fellow horse racing enthusiast Dido Harding being put in charge of the patchy £37 million Test & Trace programme, for example - it all points to a ministerial culture lacking rigour and due process. In his blog testimonies, Cummings has accused government departments of using such oversight to thwart efforts to secure things like PPE at speed. He hasn’t held back in his disdain for Hancock, either. This all might seem like more of that rough and tumble, but somewhere in the midst of the syrupy mire is a country starting to lose patience. Matt Hancock would do himself, and the country, a massive favour by disappearing from public view for a very long time. Perhaps apologising to his wife would be a start…