Jeremy Clarkson hits back at ‘monstrous’ Daily Mail

SO MUCH for the fourth estate’s festive spirit. After three weeks of being door-stepped and harangued for his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that public sector strikers should be taken out and shot in front of their families, Jeremy Clarkson has used his Sunday Times column to hit back at the Daily Mail.

“Have you ever had one of those nightmares,” asks Clarkson, “where you can neither see nor feel the monster that’s attacking you? But you know it’s going to gobble you up, burn your house down and sell your children for medical experiments?

“Well, let me tell you, such a creature exists in real life. It’s called the Daily Mail. Like a Terminator, it doesn’t know right from wrong. You can’t reason with it.”

Clarkson’s beef with the tabloid is that it could not have been clearer that he was joking when he made the now notorious comment on The One Show on 30 November – and yet the Mail, blind to the facts, was determined to pursue him.

“It [the Mail] said that I was a mental, that my mother had been extremely right-wing and that my parents had had little empathy with those less fortunate than themselves,” writes Clarkson. “Quite what my poor old mum had done to deserve this after years of unpaid public service, I’m not entirely sure.”

In Clarkson’s view, Mail reporters “look human... They have opposable thumbs and are capable of catching buses. BUT they don’t have the capacity for reason. You can tell them what happened. You can prove it. But it will make no difference.”

Clarkson gives as an example the latest twist in the saga. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, was asked last week by a member of the Commons culture committee if Clarkson was a luxury the corporation could not afford. In the Daily Mail, Clarkson says, this became a statement. “Jeremy Clarkson is a luxury the BBC cannot afford.” They had turned a question into a fact.

“I really do believe,” Clarkson concludes, “that in the whole furore over press standards the wrong newspaper has been closed down.”

Will this be the end of it? Aidan Burley, the Tory MP who lost his job as a ministeral aide after attending a stag party where the groom-to-be was photographed in SS regalia, giving a ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute, has taken the heat off Clarkson this weekend. But Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre has a very long memory. ·