Jeremy Clarkson vs the Blob – there’s only one winner

A pair of chatty books by the lord of Diddly Squat and his sidekick Kaleb Cooper have plenty to teach us about the state of modern farming

The suffocation of rural spirit by the Blob’s apparatchiks in planning departments, national-park authorities and environmental quangos was happening long before this Labour government. But the premiership of Keir Starmer has given it fresh impetus. Farmers were already seething about bureaucratic overreach, the hunting ban, the disappearance of abattoirs, endless compliance inspections and more. That anger has given way to both impotent frustration that the Tories wasted 14 years failing to reverse much of the Blair-era damage, and terror about what’s to come, as ideological Net Zero policies threaten to blight what’s left of the British countryside with pylons and solar “farms”, and a new generation of class warriors threaten family businesses with capital taxes.
Just as Trollope made us see the Victorian Church as a bloated, entitled institution, riddled with sinecures and corrupt practices, Jeremy Clarkson offers us a farmer’s-eye view of today’s wasteful, destructive Big State. Satire is what we need to help us through the next five years (at least); and, beneath his jowly, pot-bellied exterior, Clarkson is perhaps Britain’s finest satirist since the late, great Auberon Waugh. Farming has benefited by the nation’s most famous petrolhead returning to the land and using his journalistic skills to portray the Alice Through the Looking Glass world that he finds.
The pieces collected in Diddly Squat: Home to Roost (★★★★) first appeared in Clarkson’s Sunday Times column, itself often based on his Amazon Prime TV series, Clarkson’s Farm. It follows a year of Clarkson as a “hardworking farmer” scratching a living from unyielding Cotswold soil with the lovely Lisa, long-suffering Charlie and incomprehensible Gerald, making Boomerish comments about the mad modern world as he goes.
Throughout, Clarkson takes the proverbial out of the bureaucratic state we’re in. He cheerfully offends every “BLT+” minority, and is iconoclastically rude to the likes of Chris Packham and “Greta-bloody-Thunberg”. But beneath the banter and the outrageously florid prose, a calm voice of common sense is audible. Clarkson cares deeply about the countryside, and has the grace to point out that were he not backed by Amazon’s millions, he would, like many farmers, be driven close to the end of his tether by wafer-thin profit margins and endless regulation. There is a severe mental-health problem in farming – three farmers in the UK take their own lives every week – and Clarkson has done good work not just in highlighting it but in doing something about it: he funds a charitable helpline for farmers in need of support.
The marketing geniuses of Diddly Squat Farm have synchronised the publication of Clarkson’s book with one from his right-hand man, farm manager Kaleb Cooper. One has to admire the chutzpah: in truth, the typefaces in both books are about as big as you can get away with unless you’re printing for the partially sighted. Still, I’ve no doubt that people will buy stacks of them this Christmas, much as people queue for hours at the Diddly Squat farm shop to buy Clarkson’s “This Smells Like My B——s” candles.
Cooper, in fact, has a healthy disdain for books, and his world view may be limited by the fact that he doesn’t possess a passport. Nor is there much in It’s a Farming Thing (★★★), a collection of random observations on farming life think – Ladybird Book of Farming meets Viz Christmas Annual – that wasn’t aired in his previous work, The World According to Kaleb. But the banter remains enjoyable, particularly about “ahem, some hobby farmers I could mention”. And Cooper’s voice has a down-to-earth clarity, as when he questions why pubs write about “ploughman’s lunches” on menus given that real ploughmen invariably call their midday meal “dinner”. What shines through, above all, is his decency, as he contemplates parenthood, and the quality time he treasures with his own children (a toddler and a baby) when he finds gaps in his punishing schedule. He also dwells on the love and support he received from his own parents and grandparents. They produced a remarkable man, one driven by the motto “dreams don’t work unless you do.”
What Cooper is not is a success story of the British education system. He played truant through much of his early teens, getting up early to milk cows, do his egg round and, later, perform some contracting work on a tractor he bought from his earnings. When the school authorities caught up with him, he was able to complain that forcing him to attend school was costing him £200 each month in lost earnings. At the back of our minds, we compare Cooper – simple, practical, salt-of-the-earth, a true grafter who’ll work in any weather to put food on his family’s, and his country’s, tables – with the grifting parasites that men such as him have to carry on their backs: a whole client state of entitled jobsworths, with specious degrees in planning and environmental sciences, who now mostly work from home, only emerging to block and obfuscate.
Jamie Blackett’s books include Land of Milk and Honey: Digressions of a Rural Dissident. Diddly Squat is published by Michael Joseph at £22; It’s a Farming Thing is published by Quercus at £20. To order your copy for £18.99 and £16.99 respectively, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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