The End of an Error

The odious Nigel Farage has resigned.

Good.  He should have gone years ago.

But his resignation is not making the headlines.

Because Chris Evans has resigned.

I feel quite sorry for him really - Chris not Nigel - he tried his best and put together a really strong team.

And it looks like that team will carry on without him - even if the Matt LeBlanc stories I reported last week are true.

It has been said that Politics has been mirroring Shakespeare or Game of Thrones lately - two subjects I know very little of.

But Top Gear has been mirroring Politics.  It's even been doing badly against the Euro.

Chris has taken the David Cameron stance rather than the Jeremy Corbyn one.  Only time will tell if Jeremy is right but I'm pretty confident Chris is.

And it looks like there won't be a replacement for him.

So Michael Gove need not put himself forward.

Who is the More Stupid?

 

So asks some journo I've never heard of in The Mirror.  He calls himself Fleet Streetfox although the silhouette looks more like a woman but then it would be "She calls herself Fleet Streetvixen".

Whoever it is, they really have got it in for Chris Evans and, to a very, very slightly lesser extent, for Jeremy Clarkson too.

Maybe he/she/it is jealous of the success & wealth of the duo. He/she/it does comment upon the £5 Million Evans is getting for taking over TopGear.  Like the many people who complain of the millions of pounds the Top Gear stars get from licence-payers funds, they don't mention the considerably more pounds that come in to the BBC coffers as a result of the show.

The event that has caused Fleet's vitreol is filming around The Cenotaph in London including Ken Block doing doughnuts around there.  An error of judgement that I learned about this morning listening to Chris Evans apologising for on his radio show.

Quentin Willson has helpfully come out to say how it wouldn't have happened under Jeremy's watch.  Not sure why he is telling us this but it is on the BBC's own youth-oriented Newsbeat so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume they asked him for his opinion.

Jeremy, meanwhile, has been showing his softer, more liberal side...

I've not looked at the ins and outs of staying in or out of the European Union yet.  But I have been noticing the sort of people giving us their views.  The outies include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan Smith and, of course, Nigel Farage.

This makes me want to stay in.

The innies include Professor Stephen Hawking (good start there), David Cameron (Oh dear), Jeremy Corbyn (Jury's out and don't mention The Cenotaph again) and now - Jeremy Clarkson!

Surprised me that one.  But he's never actually said he hates Europe - just all the people who live there.

the Independent report his Sunday Times column, (which I'm not linking to because it costs) in which Jeremy claims to want to be part of a properly functioning EU - “Isn’t it better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly? To create a United States of Europe that functions as well as the United States of America? With one army and one currency and one unifying set of values?"

The article continues,

Warning of a world order which saw Trump set against Putin, Clarkson emphasised the need “to make the continent work the way the Continent should – as a liberal, kind, balanced fulcrum in a mad world”.

At that point I wondered if he was taking the mickey.

But I don't think he is.

Reading his stuff from the '80s and '90s shows a very right-wing Clarkson but I did notice when the Star in a Reasonably Priced car was Alistair Campbell and again for John Prescott we had a much more even-handed, almost sympathetic Clarkson.

And I know I'm worried by Putin & Trump.

So it looks like Jeremy is siding with his mate the Prime Minister and not his boss Rupert Murdoch who's views on the EU have been reported by the Evening Standard's Anthony Hilton:

“When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”