Walking through Westminster yesterday, picking my way through the sea of Barbour, I became aware that I was in the presence of destiny.
The cause of the farmers is just. At the exact point when we should be worrying about our food security in a volatile world, a Labour cabinet of myopic metropolitans has pushed a policy uniquely designed to put successful mid-sized farming businesses at risk. In plucking the Treasury’s choice of low-hanging fruit, they made a choice so stupid that even we avoided it for fourteen years.
Keir Starmer can trot out claims about how few farmers are affected all he likes. But with DEFRA claiming that Rachel Reeves’s figures are wildly inaccurate, the potential for far more estates to broken up because of her desire to prop up the NHS for a day is very high. And when John McTernan suggested small farms should go the way of the mines, he said the quiet bit out loud.
Every Labour MP elected for a rural seat can now consider it lost. Not only because they promised farmers one thing and have done the opposite, but because their heavy-handed targeting of a group with particular public sympathy has confirmed every cliché about them being more interested in appeasing public sector lifers than protecting a countryside they consider faintly racist.
Kemi Badenoch has plenty of time to decide how we should plug the piffling hole produced by reversing the policy. She might follow Fred de Fossard’s reliably excellent advice and rework our incoherent system of agricultural levies and subsidies, whilst scrapping inheritance tax altogether. Quite frankly, she has the time to think, as Labour punch themselves in the face.
But as Tom McTague writes for UnHerd this morning, one could not miss that the weltgiest moved amongst those ruddy-faced sons of the soil and wellington-wearing lovelies. I felt the same crackle of the extraordinary crackle I felt watching Donald Trump’s re-election, the same tingle that worked its way down my neck watching Sunderland declare for Leave in 2016. Clio was at work.
By common consensus, the crown lies in the gutter. Yesterday SW1 was graced, if he so chooses, by the man who could pick it up. Jeremy Clarkson has a very comfortable life: rich, a beautiful farm in Oxfordshire, an extraordinarily popular TV show. He recently became a grandad. He has no duty to go into politics. But if he did, he could bury Labour, and leave us trailing in his dust.
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. “Genuinely think that if Jeremy Clarkson entered politics now”, writes James Kangasooriam, “it could be a moment”. “Britain’s Trump…but far more English and less authoritation”, and he “has reach: a massive TV show, part of the nation’s mental furniture”. Paging Dominic Cummings: the Start-Up Party needs wellies, not wizards.
The idea of Prime Minister Clarkson is not a new one. At the height of his Top Gear popularity, it was a slogan familiar from T-shirts stretched over the bellies of pub bores, petrol heads, and sensitive Peep Show souls. He was a public-school bore, popular because he wound up Guardianistas and provoked his BBC confreres. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Yet in his reincarnation as British farming’s talisman, he has not only made Clarkson’s Farm the most entertaining thing on television but has blessed himself with far more wide-ranging appeal. Countless times have left-leaning acquaintances leant in to say they can’t usually stand Clarkson but love him now he has swapped petrol for pigs. Older and calmer, Clarkson is now cuddly.
One poll has him trailing only money-saving superstar Martin Lewis in the public’s estimation. As Robert Colvile has pointed out, the Dutch Farmer-Citizen Movement stormed to success in regional elections last year and then helped Geert Wilders into power. Farming could be a springboard to other popular grievances: NHS waiting lists, immigration insanity, and abysmal politicians.
Of course, anyone who has watched Clarkson try to reverse his Lamborghini tractor will know that the chance of him applying himself to the mind-numbing slog of draining the Whitehall swap is ludicrous. But look at Trump. For a fraction of what Elon Musk spent, a movement could be built around Clarkson as a figurehead. Tory Leninism will find its Kaleb Coopers.
Even as one hopes the political pendulum will swing back in our direction, one has to be aware that the next election will provide the best opportunity in decades for a third party to break through the Tory-Labour duopoly. Reform would hope to be the beneficiaries, but are limited by their small talent pool, and the dead weight of Nigel Farage’s popularity ceiling.
Existential to Badenoch’s leadership is proving that the Conservative Party deserves a right to exist, to make good on its mistakes, and deliver the national renewal we continually promise and continually fumble. Clarkson did more for the countryside in one series than Countryfile did in thirty years. What could he do for us? He has a far greater reach than any CCHQ video.
Whatever Labour chooses to do, the wider anger surrounding the farmer protests will fade, even if it lingers long in the memories of rural voters. Clarkson will go back to Chipping Norton to make Clarkson’s Farm 547. Other cause célèbres will emerge with champions to profile and bandwagons for Badenoch to jump on. Everything will continue to get worse in the expected fashion.
But in the short-term, and as long as they remain sensible, binding ourselves to the farmer cause and its chief spokesperson seems no bad idea. Boris Johnson stuck Ian Botham in the House of Lords. Badenoch should find a similar birth for Clarkson, even if he refuses to take the Tory whip or not. Chipping Norton is taken. But Lord Clarkson of Diddly Squat has a nice ring to it.
