Death Wish for Dickheads: Neil Oliver, Jeremy Clarkson and Digby Jones (feat. Brendan O’Neill)
The British media’s appetite for ignorant men’s opinions on everything can and will never be satisfied.
Death Wish, the clunky Charles Bronson vigilante movie directed by Michael Winner (and later remade as a clunky vehicle for Bruce Willis), should be the favourite film of a specific subset of Britain’s columnist class — the old man with ignorant opinions on everything. And that’s because the whole Death Wish franchise comes from being angry and impotent about relatively minor events.
Brian Garfield, the author of the original novel Death Wish, wrote the book after he grew angry about his wife’s purse being stolen and his car being vandalised. He wrote about ‘inspiration’:
I knew the vandal had done us no real harm… Yet my first response to the discovery of this mindless violence was swift and stark. My boundaries had been violated, my property trespassed upon. He had no right. ‘I’ll kill the son of a bitch’… It was a trivial incident but it stands out in my mind because I caught myself in an unguarded primative moment. 1
Pretending to be in an unguarded primitive moment is the exact schtick used by every bellicose broadsheet bloviator and tendentious tabloid tosser. Describing an act of vandalism as violence — making their car an innocent victim that must be avenged — is precisely the sort of thing that columnists love to do. In fact, Giles Coren got a whole arc out of the repeated thefts of his ludicrous vehicles.2
But Coren is a mere minnow compared to the great white whale of arrant self-satisfaction, Jeremy Clarkson. Presumably not satiated with the near-universal praise in the papers for his Clarkson’s Farm show, in which he tits about while a younger and far more competent person does the real work, ‘Jezza’ demanded more attention this week by honking to The Radio Times:
When it started, I read up on pandemics and they tend to be four years long.
I think the politicians should sometimes tell those communists at Sage to get back in their box. Let’s just all go through life with our fingers crossed and a smile on our face.
I can see Boris doesn’t want to open it up and shut us back down again. But if it’s going to be four years … and who knows, it could be 40 years.”
Or it could be forever. “Well, if it’s going to be forever, let’s open it up and if you die, you die.
This is all an act, of course, since we know Clarkson was so incapable of being blasé3 that in 2015, after being offered soup and a cold meat platter rather than the steak he desired, he punched Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon and called him a “lazy Irish cunt”. His punishment for that crime was to have his BBC contract go unrenewed and a much larger one with Amazon drop into his dad denim-clad lap.
Also this week, Clarkson used his Sunday Times column to artlessly chase the same cheap controversy as his frenemy Piers Morgan, having a pop at Olympic athletes presumably to make up the word count. In a piece headlined If Linford Christie had packed his lunchbox and got a proper job, he could be a billionaire by now, Clarkson hooted:
Of course, it’s easy to imagine that none of this matters. Who cares if a bunch of people want to have running and jumping competitions on the other side of the world? It’s no skin off the noses of the people back home, who aren’t paying attention.
But there’s the problem, because we are paying attention. It’s headline news when we win bronze in the 400-metre synchronised monster truck event, and we all get a surge of pride when a woman we’ve never heard of takes gold in the underwater basket-weaving contest.
This is tragic. Nothing marks out a country’s minor-league standing more effectively than its pride in things that really don’t matter: the number of world heritage sites it has, the international conferences it’s hosting, the beauty pageants it’s won and, of course, at the top of the list, the number of medals it’s winning at the Olympics. Do you think anyone else cares? Really? You reckon they’re all sitting around in bars in Uruguay saying, “Ooh, Great Britain’s doing well”?
I have the greatest respect for our athletes, of course. They have dedicated their lives to being the best person in the world at steering a canoe through some poles or throwing a hammer…
If you actually look closely at Clarkson’s prose rather than allowing it to wash over you like the rantings of some bloke at the end of the bar in the flat roof pub you unwisely nipped into during an unexpected rainstorm, you’ll discover a man who is phoning it in; sentence after sentence that could have been written by a basic machine learning algorithm trained upon Clarkson’s decades of dad joke provocations. He’s a predictable as any Death Wish plot; just as Bronson had to off another mugger, Clarkson has to bludgeon another ageing joke to death.
The list of people and things about which Clarkson has had, to quote Stewart Lee, “outrageous politically incorrect opinions every week to a deadline”, is long and includes Travellers, Asian people, Black people, murdered women, cyclists, people with special needs, the Welsh, animal rights activists, gay people, people with facial disfigurements, lorry drivers, people who take their own lives, trade unionists (who he suggested he would like to see “executed in front of their families”), Gordon Brown (who he called “a one-eyed Scottish idiot”), George Michael and Liverpool.
He long ago reached the Brian Garfield stage of taking even the most minor moments as an excuse for a massive over-reaction, usually filmed for his Amazon show or rendered in hyperbolic style for The Sun or Sunday Times.
But when someone wants to say something outrageous about him, he reaches for the law as he did when he got an injunction to stop his first wife from saying that he remained in a sexual relationship with her after he married his second wife. He later removed the injunction, blustering that:
You take out an injunction against somebody or some organisation and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the internet. It's pointless.
As well as attempting to stop the media from reporting on “sexual or other intimate acts or dealings” between Clarkson and his first wife, the injunction tried to prevent them from discussing details of Clarkson’s “private thoughts and feelings, his health and other financial affairs.”
Presumably, that was about protecting his commercial interests as he himself has no compunction in revealing any of those things (or at least the versions of them related to the ‘Clarkson’ character) for money and attention.
While it could never afford him and is instead still engaged in trying to snare Piers Morgan, Clarkson is very much the spiritual antecedent of GB News. Without him “telling it like it is” for money, attention, and the adoration of men for whom Status Quo’s double denim is not merely a fashion choice but a sartorial diktat it’s unlikely that GBeebies would exist.
Neil Oliver, the GB News presenter who archaeologists disavow in the same way that historians would like you to forget David Starkey and Autons pretend that Douglas Murray is nothing to do with them, ginned up his own version of Clarkson’s “if you die, you die” comments earlier this week.
In a six-minute rant, par for the course at GB News which allowed Dan Wootton to begin his very first show on the channel on its opening night with a speech that parroted conspiracist talking points, Oliver said:
If your freedom means that I might catch Covid from you then so be it. If my freedom means that you might catch Covid from me then so be it. That’s honestly how I see it.
For the sake of freedom, yours and mine together, I will cheerfully risk catching Covid — that is a chance, one among many, I am prepared to take, and happily.
I now firmly believe that Oliver always wears a neckerchief not for reasons of style but to prevent his head from wobbling right off.
Inevitably, given that this cursed island cannot shake off an obsession with World War II created by too many wet Sunday afternoons watching Nazis being defeated in black and white, Oliver grabbed for a Battle of Britain analogy and compared being encouraged to get a vaccine to “Nazi tyranny”.
Sitting in the cockpit of the GB News kamikaze, he said:
Those Spitfires and Hurricanes were piloted by men and also by boys not long out of school. They risked everything for freedom. Mine and yours. A last measure of devotion…
There’s another Battle of Britain being fought now, being fought by a minority outgunned and shouted down by those who would accept freedom handed to them by MPs on the condition that they do as they are told. That’s not freedom, that is tyranny and I, for one, will not live under that yoke.
Or as he might have said, “We few, you few viewers, we band of bullshitters.”
Billy Bragg, a man with a rather more nuanced understanding of British history than Oliver, offered one of the best responses. He wrote:
[Oliver] looking straight into the lens of the camera earnestly states that he’s prepared to infect other people with covid “for the sake of freedom”.
Makes me think of another sake that begins with ‘F’.
… I can’t believe he’s unfamiliar with what John Stuart Mill said about the limits of personal freedom:
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
… for a historian to have such a weak grasp of the effect that the Second World War had on individual liberties is shocking. Oliver constantly refers to that conflict without recognising that it required the whole population of the UK to put up with having their personal freedoms curtailed in order to defeat the threat of Nazism.
… By seeking to dress his wreckless individualism up in the uniform of those who served in the Second World War, Oliver has betrayed the sacrifices of that generation and shamed his own profession.
In pre-launch interviews, Andrew Neil — still AWOL from the channel on his sudden holiday — promised that GB News would have “a strong editorial charter written into everybody’s contracts saying if they spread fake news and conspiracy theories they will face disciplinary action”.
Wootton has repeatedly pumped out fake news and conspiracism on his show. He has faced no censure. And GB News proudly published a segment of Oliver’s outburst across its social media accounts, the places where it claims it’s actually having success.
So far the only presenter to have been publicly chastised by the channel is Guto Harri, whose decision to take the knee on air led to uproar among GB News’ most red-faced loyalists, a public apology from the channel, and his departure in a wider wave of employees leaping from the perpetually sinking ship.
The final member of today’s trio of the tediously wrong is Lord Digby Jones, an unholy cross between Churchill the nodding insurance dog and the butcher in a 1950s film sweating profusely as he chases a naughty mutt that is making off with his prized string of sausages.
Jones, qwhite inexplicably, decided to rant on Twitter this week about how Alex Scott, who is currently fronting BBC Olympics coverage and was capped 140 times as a football player for England, pronounces words. Perhaps mistaking Twitter for the family WhatsApp group where his relatives all have him muted, Jones ranted:
Enough! I can’t stand it anymore! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin…
Scott dignified Jones with a response, taking time out of her busy schedule to reply to his pooterish complaint:
I’m from a working-class family in East London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets and I am PROUD.
Proud of the young girl who overcame obstacles, and proud of my accent!
Jones then inevitably accused Scott of “playing the working-class card”. It’s always a ‘card’ with men like him, isn’t it? And, of course, he then wailed to LBC:
[My opinion] doesn't mean I should be cancelled, and it doesn't mean that people have to be incredibly rude".
His lordship using the word ‘cancelled’ activated the Brendan O’Neill signal and the night sky was suddenly filled with the silhouette of a vast forehead. O’Neill rushed to his keyboard and dashed off a piece for The Spectator headlined Alex Scott, Digby Jones and the snobbery of low expectations.
Having previously written at length about snobs, O’Neill had to execute a logical judo move on his past self to explain his latest contrarian position:
I’m torn on this discussion. Like Scott, I’m from a working-class family in London, though north-west rather than east. And I detest snobbery, which is rife in modern Britain. Who can forget the five-year orgy of class hatred that followed the vote for Brexit in 2016, when commentators, politicos and plummy activists daubed in blue paint raged against thick northerners and brainwashed tabloid-readers for voting Leave?
It’s an irony not lost on me, at any rate, that many of the same people currently fuming about Digby Jones will have supported that painfully snobbish effort to trash the largest vote in UK history. Yes, Sadiq Khan, we’re looking at you — you offered your ‘Sarf London’ (cringe) solidarity to Ms Scott, yet you spent much of the past five years trying to overturn millions of working-class people’s votes.
What is it about Sadiq Khan that means Brendan O’Neill has to crowbar him into so many of his articles? It’s qwhite mystifying.
Still, the horny-handed man of the people and… uh… editor of Spiked managed to find a way to side with the establishment figure again. He wrote:
I think Digby Jones has a point. Leaving the G off the end of words like rowing, swimming, boxing etc is mispronunciation. It’s incorrect English. This isn’t about accent or class. It’s about speaking clearly and universally. That is something we should encourage, no? Especially on the BBC. No, we shouldn’t go back to the days when every Beeb presenter sounded like Mr Cholmondley Warner and the only time you ever heard a regional accent on the box was when Ena Sharples was moaning in a corner of the Rover’s Return about young people’s loose morals. A variety of accents on TV is a very good thing. But everyone should aspire to speak clearly in order to connect with as broad an audience as possible.
I think the true snobbery in this strange spat comes not from Digby Jones, but from Stephen Fry. He is the privately educated possessor of one of the poshest, clearest, most mellifluous speaking voices in the British media. And yet there he is essentially saying to Alex Scott — and, by extension, other working-class folk in the media — ‘Carry on speaking as you do. It’s fabulous'. Isn’t this the snobbery of low expectations? It smacks of saying that these working-class people can’t help how they talk — it’s part of their cultcha, innit?
Of course, O’Neill doesn’t quote Fry in his piece because doing so would require him to engage with the words he actually said rather than the caricature of an indulgent metropolitan that O’Neill has sketched out for Spectator readers. Fry wrote to Jones:
You are everything linguists and true lovers of language despise. Also, since we’re being picky, you are not “Lord Digby Jones”, you are Digby, Lord Jones. There’s a world of difference. But however you’re titled, you disgrace the upper house with your misplaced snobbery
I’m not a fan of Fry’s particularly — for reasons that would take a whole other newsletter edition to explain — but he didn’t patronise Scott, he merely slapped down Jones. If Fry had agreed with Jones and joining in the bashing of Scott, O’Neill would have written a column attacking him for that.
O’Neill is one of the sons of Clarkson. He has ‘shocking’ opinions for money and always chooses the contrarian position. All he really believes is that people should listen to him and he’ll flail in whatever direction will ensure that happens. The first line of The Guardian’s review of the Death Wish remake comes to mind:
Death Wish is a fantasy about a 62-year-old bald man who can flip up his hoodie and suddenly become cool.
Brendan O’Neill’s oeuvre is a fantasy about a titanically foreheaded man who can pop on his baseball cap and suddenly become punk rock.
Whether it’s O’Neill, Clarkson, Oliver, or Coren, these mediocre men make their money and get their beloved attention by offering their opinions endlessly whether they know anything about the topic or not. They are ersatz Charles Bronsons with access to bylines and broadcast studios, forever seeking revenge for the tiniest of sleights.
Following his disgusting tweets about Dawn Foster — which I wrote about here — I hope that he never has a cargo unstolen.
A word he no doubt refuses to use as it’s too bloody French.