“Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.”

No, Mr Clarkson. No, they don’t

Or, if they do, then that must be restricted to those of your age born, as were you, on 11 April 1960. I, thankfully, came to the world the next year, and I am most definitely not your age, and not of your mind, either.

But, Mr Clarkson, you were never one to exactly temper your remarks or actions. A fist in the gob of a TV producer is par for the course, a diatribe against this car or that, pfft, what do they expect? And women – WOMEN: they’re fair game come fair or foul weather. No, Mr Clarkson, none of this is par for the course, even if it’s par for yours. And, come fair or foul weather, of one thing we may be sure: what emits from your mouth will certainly be foul.

Jeremy Clarkson, for the rest of you, is a “TV personality”. He came to his fore in the BBC2 programme “Top Gear”, a quiet little niche programme that started life as an interesting review and analysis of the motor trade, the latest automotive developments and the new products we all could one day perhaps buy. Under Clarkson’s tutelage, the programme transmuted into a shrine devoted to boy racers, speed queens and machines well outside the pocket of the average Joe, turning to crass trials to see what happens to a caravan when driven at 120 m.p.h. (it disintegrates, not unsurprisingly) and a driving tour of Albania, where, it was reported, there seem to be more UK-registered cars than Albanian-registered ones.  He was likable to a degree, even cuddly at times, and he won favour with viewing audiences for calling things what they were – even “crap” – while ostensibly remaining just on the right side of fair. A Yorkshireman by birth, he has retained his innate Yorkshire flair for bluntness: a flat iron is positively sharp in comparison. Many who formulate a view on a snippet of news or a leading light in the personality stakes will do so and quietly keep it to themselves, perhaps discuss it in conversation with friends and even propound it in social media. Mr Clarkson broadcasts his to the world, through the pages of The Sun newspaper, in which he has a permanent column. He believes his views, on personages such as the Duchess of Sussex, are valid enough to warrant such public dissemination; and, in more modest measure, I believe that my views on him merit similar.

To give context: Mr Clarkson has published his views on Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex (the wife of the Duke of Sussex, or Prince Harry), and stated his fervent hope to see her utterly and absolutely denigrated in the public eye. In more specific terms, he is “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

The Bible contains many an admonition, but one that is quoted – and likewise ignored – frequently is that he without sin should be the first to cast stones. But, unlike Clarkson of Sussex, I do not dream of a day when Jeremy will walk naked anywhere, let alone down a street in any town to have lumps of excrement thrown at him. For that is a feat he has himself achieved by way of his article in The Sun.

I tend to the view that, whatever their world view, whatever errors have been committed by them or their families, and their fans and followers, the Duchess has had naught but difficulty in her external relations since coming into the acquaintance of Prince Harry; and the pair have found great love with one another. If that is true, it fits the image that’s projected. If it’s not true, it is certainly an image they endeavour to project, and whether it’s true or not is not a matter of the slightest concern to me. If they’re happy, I’m happy; if they’re not, it doesn’t affect my happiness. Only I affect my happiness.

And yet, happiness is a factor that greatly depends on our relations with others. With those we know and with those we don’t know. That Mr Clarkson is expressing a personal view is beyond question. The same sort of personal view that I hold about the Duchess, about her husband, about Mr Clarkson. He has his newspaper column; I have this blog. He airs his views in The Sun; mine are expressed here. But what does he wish to achieve by airing his views? And what do I hope to achieve by airing mine?

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last.” Martin Luther King, Junior, quoted these immortal words, words of inspiration, and of an aspiration that, to this day, has fallen short of fulfilment, in the course of his famous “I have a dream” speech. Yes, King also dreamed, but not of naked women in British towns having excrement thrown at them. He’d had enough excrement thrown at him and his followers to know that that is something you dream of for no one. To dream of nakedness and excrement is to dream of Hades and of such visions as can be observed in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, whose third panel depicts scenes quite removed from anything that is conceivable as an “earthly delight”. If those are Jeremy Clarkson’s dreams then he may be disappointed not to see the Duchess of Sussex, but he will likely see other souls suffering the ignominy of which he dreams, for Bosch’s depiction of Hell is like as not where he’s headed. Why, perhaps he shall be the one so deserving of such treatment.

To wish ill on another is sinful, but not unlawful. To enact ill on another is unlawful. So, what of an expression of free will that is tantamount to the infliction of ill on another? While incitement to cause criminal damage or lesionon another person is proscribed by many a law, and even failure to act to prevent the peril of another is sometimes seen as constituting a criminal offence, the offence – for the time being largely restricted to the domain of morality – of spouting hateful words by which another might discern a certain acceptability of the harming of others remains lawful. We cherish the freedom of speech above the nefarious consequences that the exercise of that freedom might result in: exclusion, rejection, denial of rights, death. And rape.

Of the last of these, I wrote most recently here. I believe that rape – a crime whose incidence is on the astonishing rise and punishment for which is meted out on less than 5% of reported cases, not to mention the atrocious, unpunished cases of it reported from the battlegrounds that are Ukraine, Syria and Yemen – is a dangerous omen for the crumbling morality that holds our societies together. It is perpetrated not only against women but also against men. It is a savage, brutal crime, more an exercise of power than a fulfilment of bodily want, and, I believe, it is indicative of a more deep-seated thirst for power that goes far beyond the simple dimensions of the crime itself. And, with its increased incidence comes increased apathy and inurement to the act as “a part of life”. Statistically in the UK, one-quarter of women will be raped or sexually assaulted at some point in their adult life. I know one personally in Germany, an astonishingly brave woman whose attacker was caught and tried, and acquitted. Nothing weakens the case against a rapist quite like the four-year period from arrest to trial, lived through by a victim in shock and dread of the next occurrence; for the process of healing and forgetting militates in precisely the opposite direction from providing confident, cogent evidence in the witness box. And, of course, the victim is always “asking for it.”

Well, is that what the Duchess of Sussex is asking for: to parade naked and be smeared with shit? She may not be the legendary Lady Godiva, but Mr Clarkson has certainly set about with the mud-slinging. And though his mud’s directed at a single women, he cannot be unaware that he is setting a tone for “normalcy”, which many will take as his yearning for a world where such acts become normal, who will run, as they ran with his fervour for sports cars and speed, and commit acts commensurate with his world view, that some women are simply dross to be mocked, be it in the pages of newspapers or Britain’s streets of shame. Mr Clarkson, this is my world too and, while I’m not your age, I’m of your age. And I will fight you and your idea of propriety as much as I have to fight the reflux that rises up my throat when I read of you.

I disagree with what you say and I shall not defend to the death your right to say it. Enough. We are free wherever we turn: look around you at your unbounded freedoms; and look again at the unrelenting restrictions on what we call our “freedoms”: they spring from a concern to reign in freedom, lest it be covertly weaponised to undermine democracy; and, despite ourselves, there are those that do undermine our democracy - a fate that may yet befall that of “speech”. Do we really suppose that those who vaunt “free speech” as a God-given right, unrestrained in its exercise, seek to bolster and uphold the democratic freedoms that remain to us? That is the kind of freedom laid claim to by slave-owners and the Nazis, that is vaunted by Kanye West, fashion house Balenciaga and their likes, and that is shamelessly denied by the US Republican Party and its cronies in court.

“Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way”? It is an untruth, a ploy, a veil, the same rhetoric as Donald Trump has used till it’s worn thin: an arrant deception grounded in the mantra that “If I say a nonsense often enough, I’ll force it to be a truth.”

Not in this world, Mr Clarkson. Not in mine. You can wrangle your cattle; you can’t wrangle me.

Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500 - Prado, Madrid). Public domain.