AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL …

One learned the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s prostate cancer diagnosis with the sort of resigned amusement that greets any minor reversal in the fortunes of a man who has spent decades reversing expensive German saloons into ditches for our entertainment. Here was the human equivalent of a V8 engine—loud, inefficient, gloriously unnecessary—being told by his own plumbing that it might, after all, have limits. The prostate, that most undignified of organs, had apparently decided to stage its own farmers’ protest. One pictures the offending gland, red-faced and tweed-clad, waving a placard that reads “No to Woke Waterworks.”

For years Clarkson has been the last unapologetic roar in a culture that prefers the polite electric hum of virtue. He has offended vegetarians, cyclists, Germans, the Welsh, the Scots, civil servants, Remainers, climate activists, and anyone who has ever uttered the phrase 'sustainable development goals' without laughing. Now his own body has joined the protestors. It is the ultimate Clarkson moment: even his internal organs have turned out to be reactionary.

The response from the usual quarters has been predictably exquisite. There were the ritual expressions of sympathy from people who have spent the previous decade wishing him dead in interestingly detailed ways on social media. One can almost hear the grinding of teeth behind the Hallmark-card condolences: “Thoughts with Jeremy and his family at this difficult time,” typed by hands that only yesterday were composing threads about how Clarkson’s very existence was a form of violence. Cancer, it seems, is the one thing capable of briefly silencing the baying of the online hounds—though not for long. Already one senses the hedged bets: yes, cancer is bad, but has he considered the carbon footprint of chemotherapy? Perhaps the NHS could treat him with thoughts and prayers generated by wind power.

This is where one must declare an interest, or at least an affection. I have always enjoyed Clarkson in the way one enjoys a particularly belligerent old pub bore who happens to be right about most things. He is not subtle. Subtlety is for people who write think-pieces about the semiotics of the flat white. Clarkson is the man who looks at an Alpine road and sees not an opportunity for quiet reflection on climate change but a chance to discover whether a Lamborghini can achieve flight. His genius—and it is a genius, however unfashionable—lies in understanding that most people secretly want to drive too fast, eat too much, and say the unsayable without first checking with Human Resources.

His farming programmes, those gentle masterpieces of curmudgeonry, revealed the man more truly than any of the motoring shows. Here was Clarkson discovering that agriculture is not a moral failing but an actual job performed by actual people who must contend with weather, bureaucracy, and the fact that half the population thinks food grows in Waitrose. One watched him struggle with sheep and subsidies and felt the warm glow of recognition: at last, a television personality prepared to admit that expertise might occasionally reside outside Islington.

The cancer diagnosis, like everything else in Clarkson’s life, will no doubt be turned to account. One awaits the inevitable Clarkson’s Cancer special with something approaching glee. There will be a track day at some unsuitable location involving chemotherapy patients in high-performance wheelchairs. There will be a monologue about how the NHS waiting list is longer than the M25 on a bank holiday. There will be an expensive bottle of something unsuitable drunk in defiance of medical advice, followed by a segment in which he attempts to race a prostate cancer awareness ribbon against a Bugatti. The man is incapable of solemnity, which is precisely why we need him.

Modern Britain has developed an almost erotic relationship with solemnity. We have solemnity about the climate, solemnity about identity, solemnity about pronouns, solemnity about everything except the things that actually matter. Into this festival of earnestness strode Clarkson, all six-foot-five of him, complaining that the coffee was cold and the car was German. He was never going to win awards from the Broadcasting Standards people. He was too busy winning the affection of people who still remember that entertainment should sometimes be entertaining.

There is a peculiar English pleasure in watching a man refuse to be improved. The therapeutic culture demands that we all become better versions of ourselves—more mindful, more sustainable, more in touch with our feelings. Clarkson’s response has always been to buy another Aston Martin and drive it through a river. Now the river has come to him, in the form of rogue cells with ideas above their station. One suspects he will treat the disease with the same mixture of irritation and dark humour he applies to everything else. “Not now, I’m trying to harvest beetroot,” he will mutter, before writing another column about how the NHS has all the organisational efficiency of a Top Gear production meeting.

The wider point, which the solemn ones will miss, is that Clarkson represents something increasingly rare: the right to be wrong in public. Not wrong in the sense of being mistaken about facts—though he has been that too, gloriously—but wrong in the sense of holding opinions that offend the prevailing consensus. In an age when deviation from the script can end careers, here was a man who treated the script as something to be used for kindling. That he did so while becoming enormously successful only compounded the offence. The chattering classes could forgive poverty; they could not forgive popularity achieved without their permission.

Cancer, of course, doesn’t care about any of this. It is the great equaliser, the ultimate reminder that biology has not read the Guardian. Even the mighty Clarkson, conqueror of caravans and critic of cycle lanes, must now contend with the frailty of meat. One hopes—fervently, if not solemnly—that he beats the bastard thing. Not because he is a saint (he isn’t) or because his views are correct on every point (they aren’t), but because a world without him would be marginally more boring, marginally more frightened of its own shadow.

In the meantime, one raises a glass—something full-blooded and inappropriate—to the man himself. May his prostate prove as stubborn as its owner. May his recovery be swift, his complaints loud, and his subsequent television output even more politically catastrophic than before. The forces of dullness have enough on their side already. They don’t need to claim this scalp too. Godspeed, you magnificent, impossible sod.

MAKERFIELD DRAGS BRITAIN INTO BURNHAM'S BODY BAG

In the damp, dispirited terraces of Makerfield, where the ghosts of pitheads still murmur grievances to the wind, one beheld last night a spectacle as quintessentially British as warm beer and cold feet: a by-election. 

Andy Burnham, that genial Mancunian mayor who styles himself the King of the North (a title one suspects he awarded after a particularly successful session with the focus groups), sauntered into Parliament with 24,927 votes—54.8% of the turnout, no less. Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon trailed some 9,231 votes behind, a result greeted in certain quarters with the sort of hollow cheer usually reserved for a football team that has avoided relegation by the skin of its teeth. Turnout, at a giddy 58.8%, represented the highest by-election participation since the days when Maggie was still terrifying the unions. One almost expected bunting. 

Yet beneath the modest statistical uplift lurks the true story of our benighted polity: voter apathy so profound it makes a Trappist monk look like a gossip. Thousands of of eligible souls simply could not be roused from their sofas, even with the prospect of sending a message to the Westminster circus. They stayed home, these noble abstainers, presumably to binge-watch box sets or contemplate the rising cost of central heating while muttering that “they’re all the same.” One feels a certain dry admiration for their consistency. At least they are reliably useless. 

This, dear reader, is where the Australian model beckons like a stern but fair-minded relative. Compulsory voting. Yes, the very notion sends shudders through the libertarian wing—those delicate flowers who prize their 'freedom' to do nothing above all else. But imagine it: every citizen frog-marched to the polling station under pain of a modest fine. The ballot boxes would overflow not merely with ticked boxes but with the glorious effluvia of a truly engaged electorate. Millions of comedic cocks and balls, exquisitely rendered in biro. Crude caricatures of party leaders. Shopping lists. The occasional heartfelt poem about the price of bread. Democracy, in short, laid gloriously bare. Far better this riot of vulgar self-expression than the silent, sullen void we currently endure. At least the nation would be heard, even if in the language of the urinal wall. 

The centre-right, meanwhile, continues its time-honoured tradition of self-immolation. Conservatives scraped a pitiful 997 votes. The right-wing vote, such as it is, splinters like a cheap wine glass at a wake: Reform here, some Restorationist splinter there, a few lonely Lib Dems wandering in the wilderness. One pictures a dozen well-meaning chaps in tweed arguing over doctrinal purity while Labour’s machine simply hoovers up the disaffected. It is less a political strategy than performance art for masochists. If the right wishes to win again, it might consider ceasing to treat electoral politics as an exercise in purist fragmentation. But old habits, like bad hangovers, die hard. 

And what of the victor? Burnham, the change candidate who promises—oh, how he promises—to be the final chance for Labour to alter course. The irony is thicker than a Wigan pie crust. Here is a man who has long positioned himself as the authentic voice of the North, the antidote to metropolitan slickness, the fellow who actually gets the post-industrial heartlands. Yet one suspects the change he delivers will be largely cosmetic: fresh slogans, perhaps a more northern accent in the dispatch box, but the same creaking machinery of high taxes, open borders, net zero zealotry, and cultural lectures from people who have never changed a fuse. No fundamental reckoning with the failures that produced Reform’s strong showing. No serious course correction. Just more of the same, served with a side order of regional pride. 

One watches the prospect of Prime Minister Burnham with the queasy fascination of a man observing an oncoming bus. The country, already wearied by one set of managerial progressives, may soon exchange them for another who knows the words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The blind Labour voters—those tribal loyalists who would support a lamp-post if it carried the rose—will cheer. The apathetic will continue not voting. And the rest of us will be left pondering whether compulsory voting, cock-and-ball doodles and all, might at least force the polity into something resembling honest confrontation with itself. 

Makerfield has spoken, after a fashion. The question is whether anyone in Westminster is capable of listening through the fog of their own complacency. One rather doubts it. The circus rolls on.

THE PLUCKY PLUMBER & THE PROFESSIONAL DRIP

In the damp, dog-eared corners of British public life, where politics has long since traded the honest sweat of the workshop for the synthetic sheen of the focus group, one occasionally stumbles upon a figure so refreshingly unvarnished that he seems to have wandered in from an Ealing comedy that somehow survived the Blair era. Enter Robert Kenyon, plumber, Army Reservist, ex-NHS hand, and now Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election. A man who, according to his supporters, has already weathered the ritual scourging of modern democracy: those awkward social media posts from yesteryear, exhumed and brandished like medieval relics by the righteous. Cancel culture, they call it. More like the political equivalent of your mother finding your teenage diary and reading it aloud at Christmas.

One looks at Kenyon—rifle in hand in his reservist uniform, the very picture of a man who has fixed boilers and served Queen and country—and feels a pang of nostalgia for the species of politician that Britain once produced without thinking. The Mr Smith Goes to Westminster type: local, rooted, slightly rumpled, possessed of the dangerous notion that representing one’s neighbours might involve understanding how their drains work and what time the buses actually run. These were men (and occasionally women) who had done something before they did politics. They had calluses, not just position papers. They had met a payroll, or missed one. They knew the price of a pint and the weight of a grievance.

Alas, that sturdy breed has largely been culled. In its place we have the professional politician: smooth as a Teflon-coated conscience, fluent in the dialect of the think-tank, and about as connected to the daily realities of Makerfield as a management consultant is to the concept of honest toil. They glide from student union to special adviser to safe seat with the effortless grace of a ballroom dancer who has never had to worry about the electricity bill. Their idea of working-class authenticity is remembering to drop their aitches during the local radio interview.

And here lies the deeper irony, for while we in Britain lament the disappearance of the authentic local candidate, it has somehow become even harder to find one across the Atlantic. America, that great noisy republic once famed for sending farmers, shopkeepers, and the odd war hero to Washington, now finds itself largely governed by a different sort. The bored urban housewife who decamped to the countryside for 'the lifestyle' discovered that parish council seats were available, and decided public service would make an amusing hobby between Pilates and sourcing the right shade of Farrow & Ball for the guest cottage. One pictures her arriving at the town meeting with a reusable coffee cup and a sheaf of notes about 'community cohesion', while the local mechanic quietly wonders who will fix the potholes that have been swallowing his customers’ suspensions since the last ice age.

Britain has not quite sunk to that level of genteel amateurism, though we are trying our best. Our own version tends toward the career activist or the quangocrat who has spent decades being paid by the taxpayer to worry about the taxpayer. Andy Burnham, the opponent in this particular bout, is a polished specimen of the breed: telegenic, articulate, the sort of man who can deliver a soundbite about 'levelling up' without once betraying the suspicion that he knows what a spirit level actually looks like. He has the professional politician’s greatest gift: the ability to look deeply concerned about problems he helped create, or at the very least, failed to notice until the focus groups rang the alarm.

Against this backdrop, Robert Kenyon stands as a minor miracle of the sort that gives one cautious, qualified hope. Not because he is perfect—perfection in politics is usually the first warning sign of a coming tyranny—but because he is gloriously, defiantly imperfect in all the right ways. A man who has wrenched pipes and worn the uniform. Someone who might, just possibly, view a constituent’s complaint about housing or jobs through the prism of lived experience rather than the latest briefing paper from the Institute for Sounding Plausible. One hopes his working-class credentials prove more durable than the inevitable barrage of metropolitan sneers that will come his way. The commentariat will no doubt dismiss him as 'populist', that favourite slur of people who believe democracy should be restricted to those with the correct opinions and the right accent.

Whether the voters of Makerfield will choose the plumber over the professional remains to be seen. But in an age when politics has become a branch of performance art for the credentialed classes, the mere presence of a candidate who looks like he could unblock your sink while discussing defence procurement is something approaching revolutionary. It may not be Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But in today’s Britain, Mr Kenyon Goes to the By-Election feels like the closest thing we have to a plot worth following. One can only hope the audience still has the good sense to cheer for the man with the wrench rather than the man with the script.