P&J Column for 6.10.14

1000 Argentinians versus Jeremy Clarkson – those odds seem wrong. Can we have 1000 more Argentinians, please?

Shelley Shingles, Showbiz correspondent and Miss Fetteresso 1983

Some journalists are just waiting for the next celeb to come a cropper and make a totes embarrassment of themselves. They can’t wait for something horrible to happen to them so they can stick the boot in to the poor soul. Well I’m not like that at all, loyalty is my middle name, and the last thing I would do is try to make column inches out of the misfortune of the A-listers I am proud to call my friends. Mind you, have you seen Jeremy Clarkson’s latest international relations gaffe? OMG! Talk about a repeat offender!

Jezzer and his pals, James May and Richard “the Hammond” Hamster, have got themselves mixed up in a bit of Argy Bargie. The three amigos were filming in Argentina for a Top Gear special – which makes the bitter pill of your TV license that wee bit easier to swallow, doesn’t it? Apparently, the number plate on Clarkson’s fancy car looked like a reference to the Falkland’s War and the locals were not best pleased! Before you could say ‘Diego Maradona’, the lads were being chased all the way to the border by an angry mob. If you ask me, the Argies would have had it in for the Top Gear team with or without offensive registration. My uncle Sholto never forgave the Argentinians for what happened in the 60s after he tried corned beef for the first time, so when he went to the World Cup in 1978 with Ally’s Army, he hired an old Ford Anglia and stuck his own number plate on it – but nobody looked twice at ‘TYP4OID’. So I think Jeremy’s “coincidental” reg plate had nothing to do with it – he’s just the kinda guy who’s totally unwelcome wherever he goes, poor lamb.

Of course, me and Jezzer go way back, I first met him at a motor show down at Knockhill race track. He was there to fulfil a contractual obligation to one of his sponsors and I was doing some spokes-modelling work for the Twin Spires Creamery, dressed as a giant tetra-pak carton of Semi-skimmed. Just before he drove a lap he came up to me. ‘Your outfit looks even faster…than my car’ he said, slowing down and dropping his voice at the end of the sentence.

‘Eh?’ I immediately shot back.

‘It’s pasteurised before you even…put it on’”

Wise words from a great man.

Cosmo Ludovik Fawkes-Hunte, 13th Earl of Kinmuck

At last, some stout British common sense from the Tories! I had all but given up on the Conservative Party, what with their abstentionist foreign policy (really, what is the point of maintaining a standing army only to leave them standing idly by?) and failure to re-introduce the death penalty for benefits fraudsters and defecting MPs. But at last – with the proposal to free our courts from the oppressive yoke of the European Convention on Human Rights – one can detect a glimmer of life left in the party, and the prospect of Britain becoming Great again.

Mind you, I am not insensitive to human rights. I am a great respecter of equality. If you enter onto my property without my express permission, I will shoot you, irrespective of race, age or gender. Neither do I discriminate on the basis of social class. Of my current stable of seven mistresses, only a bare majority attended private schools. And – to the disquiet of some of the chaps down at the club – I am an ardent supporter of gay marriage: I believe they have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us.

But for all that, I welcome the prospect of British rules for British subjects. For too long Mr Justice Foreigner has been able to stick his garlicky beak into British affairs and bring down his knockwurst gavel on our British laws. As I said to Lady Fawkes-Hunte just the other week (as we were parking the BMW before dinner at Poldino’s and then going to see our own, wonderful Scottish National Orchestra play a selection of works by Beethoven and Mozart), what on earth has Europe ever done for us?

But most fundamentally of all, the repeal of the Human Rights Act would be a clarion call to those of us who have been so badly abused by the current political caste: we, the aristocracy, so self-evidently born to rule, must now awake. The vandalism of the so-called modernising agenda can be arrested and things can go back to how they were. Obviously, returning our country to the glory days of the mid-1700s remains a distant dream. But through incremental, sensible steps – the abolition of the secret ballot and of married women’s rights to property, and the re-introduction of slavery – progress could be made in certain, specific areas. And who wouldn’t support that?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way, who wouldn’t support it? Reveal yourselves, so that I, and (if necessary) the thumbscrews used to such devastating effect by the Seventh earl can persuade you of the error of your ways.