Jeremy Clarkson: populist tribune Labour should fear his instinctive Toryism

Capturing a glimpse of Napoleon at the head of his Grande Armée in 1806, Hegel described him as the world soul on horseback. Today, such figures do not appear in small German towns leading revolutionary armies, but on YouTube, Spotify and TikTok, carried aloft — and into our minds and souls — by the chaotic ranks of influencers, algorithms, podcasters and memesters shaping our world.

Donald Trump is no Napoleon, but he has captured the spirit of our age: America’s soul riding forth on X. It is hard to open any social media app today — pace Bluesky— and not be struck by the sense that something has shifted in the zeitgeist. The Right is winning and it’s becoming cool. A new epoch has begun. Where NFL players once took the knee, now they are doing the “Trump dance”, while UFC fighters bow to their great Caesar as he strides in the modern, fighting colosseums of today. Animal spirits have been released into the popular culture that are as powerful as they are unpredictable.

But what about those of us living outside America? There is no obvious British Joe Rogan or British Elon Musk today — the Horace and Crassus of our age. Perhaps that is because these men are just as powerful here as they are in the States. In fact, just as we have entered something of an economic depression these past 15 years, so too are we stuck in a cultural and ideological rut. To look at Britain today is to be struck by an overwhelming sense of quaint, platitudinous predictability: more poor Vienna than booming Austin. There is no British Musk because there is no British Silicon Valley; and there is no British Rogan, because there is almost no popular, home grown counter-cultural energy — not yet at least.

But down at the farmers’ protest an intriguing presence strides into view: Jeremy Clarkson. “Why are you here Mr Clarkson?” the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire demanded as he joined those protesting the Government’s decision to impose inheritance tax on family farms worth over £1 million. “Well, I’m here to support farmers,” he replied, without obvious hostility. Derbyshire, though, persisted. “This is not about you and your farm and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”

As Derbyshire pointed out, Clarkson had written as much in The Sunday Times. “Classic BBC,” Clarkson replied, with seemingly genuine exasperation. “You people.”

Clarkson then proceeded to deliver a message of clean popular fury more in tune with the spirit of the day than anything I have heard out of Westminster in years — not since Take Back Control anyway. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Clarkson began. “I wanted to shoot… which came with the benefit of not paying inheritance tax. Now I do. But people like me will put it in a trust and as long as I live for seven years that’s fine. But why should all these people do that?”

It was hard not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water in those remarks. “A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular,” Dave Chapelle explained on Saturday Night Live. “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio had never seen someone like him. He’s what I call an honest liar. That first debate, I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never seen a white, male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs: This whole system is rigged.”

Chapelle is referring to the scene when Hillary Clinton accused Trump of using a loophole to avoid paying taxes. Asked by the moderator whether this was true, Trump replied that of course it was. “I absolutely used it and so did Warren Buffet and George Soros and many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from,” he went on before delivering the killer line: “She complains that Donald Trump is taking advantage of the tax code, so why didn’t you change it when you were senator? The reason is because all your friends take the same advantage that I do.” The fact that Clarkson was attracted to buying a farm because it came with the benefit of avoiding inheritance tax will also, I suspect, be of little interest to most people in Britain who do not like this government. The fact that he said he bought a farm to go shooting and avoid inheritance tax will, in fact, be seen as welcome honesty.

Just as Trump hit on a central truth with his admission of tax avoidance — an honest lie as Chapelle put it — Clarkson alighted on a number of burning questions in British politics today which do not neatly map onto our traditional political system. When he asked why farmers should pay inheritance tax, Derbyshire replied with the obvious counter that if not farmers, then how else will the government fund public services? “I tell you,” Clarkson answered, pointing up at the government offices surrounding him. “Walk into any of the offices around here and if you don’t understand their job, fire them.” In other words: don’t tax; cut.

And here, not only do we have a British expression of the Trump zeitgeist, but a British incantation of the Musk agenda. The power of Musk’s prospective Department of Government Efficiency is that even in defeat, it opens up the prospect of something new in Western politics, much as Thatcher changed the nature of British politics even as she abandoned some core tenets of her agenda.

Clarkson, though, represents something more interesting — and more distinctly British — than mere government efficiency. To watch even a few episodes of his hit show Clarkson’s Farm is to immediately realise that while it contains much of the energy of Top Gear, at heart it carries a far more profound message than the populist caricature he usually does little to disavow. Essentially, Clarkson’s Farm tells us that farming must be protected in a collective national endeavour because it provides our life source: food. It is elemental: an expression of an old, almost forgotten Toryism — not free-trade but protectionist, national, territorial and utterly opposed to centralising notions of uniformity.

The programme overlaps with other expressions of Toryism too: inheritance, obviously, but also questions of conservation and an instinctive opposition to a distant, bureaucratic state. Occasionally, as a viewer, you are suddenly struck by the sensation that Clarkson is quietly delivering a sermon on rural life, smuggled into your living room under the guise of an entertaining countryside farce, a Tractor Top Gear.

Clarkson pulled the same trick on the podium at the march, complaining not just about Starmer’s “infernal government” and the BBC being its mouthpiece, but also about the ordinary consumer who will buy imported chickens to save money. “Yeah, you can, but it’s so full of chlorine, it tastes like a swimming pool with a beak.”

Farming, Clarkson reminds us, remains a great touchstone issue of Brexit, shaping its eventual form. Liz Truss, remember, is held in open disdain by farmers — not for the insanity of her “mini budget”, but for the content of her free trade deals with New Zealand and Australia.

In Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, he captures the old Tory icon’s politics as that of “genuine hatred of centralisation, bureaucracy and every manifestation of the Benthamite state”. This, Disraeli believed, was what Gladstone represented. “[Disraeli] felt the sort of reverence that Burke had had for the many independent corporations and institutions which, however odd and anomalous, however contrary to the abstract symmetry, to what Burke called the ‘geometrical theories’, were the true bulwarks of English liberty,” Burke wrote. This, I think, remains the essence of the Tory instinct, still alive even as the party veers off towards libertarianism or social democracy.

“In a progressive country change is constant,” Disraeli once warned. “The great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” To Disraeli, the former was a “national system” and the latter a “philosophic system”.

Clarkson represents the national system; Starmer and Reeves the philosophical one. If I were Starmer, I would be worried that this is the wrong side to be on today, especially in this era of Trump. Clarkson’s politics, it seems to me, are like T.E. Utley’s self-professed brand of Toryism: “at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment”. Just because Clarkson’s politics do not map onto the prejudices of the two main parties today — being neither pro-European nor pro-global free trade — does not invalidate them, but rather, potentially, elevates them.

Clarkson, like Trump, is not a new phenomenon in any sense. He is old, rich, famous and good on TV. He has been expressing the same kind of thoughts for as long as I have been alive. And yet he has become new by remaining still. And that is why this Labour government shouldn’t mock his appearance at yesterday’s farmers’ protest. “I don’t think farmers will go on strike,” Clarkson said. “I think farmers can do better than that. And I’ve got some ideas.”

This should give Keir Starmer pause. Rather than ignoring this protest as another squeal of special interests from the old Britain he intends to put out of its misery, he should take seriously the prospect that it is actually a first expression of the new Britain coming into being: not riding on a horse, but a tractor.  Starmer needs to do everything he can to ensure Clarkson’s ideas do not involve the words: “Reform UK”, “Start Up Party” or worst of all “the Tories”.

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