Jeremy Clarkson has spoken out about what he considers “unfair” BBC coverage of accusations made against Nigel Farage during his school days.
His criticism appeared in his latest Friday column for The Sun, where Mr Clarkson took aim at those who claim the BBC “isn’t biased”.
The Clarkson Farm star is no stranger to using his long-running column, which he has written since 1996, to criticise the broadcaster, both during and after his time with the corporation.
In this week’s column, the presenter argued the BBC shows selective bias not through explicit opinion but through editorial decisions, choosing which stories to amplify and which to ignore.
Jeremy Clarkson called out “unfair” BBC coverage of accusations made against Nigel Farage
|
Nigel Farage“On Monday evening, the lead item on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News was about accusations of institutional bias at the BBC,” Mr Clarkson wrote.
He then highlighted what he saw as hypocrisy, saying: “Ten minutes later, on the same bulletin, they ran an item about a story that had appeared in the Guardian, claiming that Nigel Farage used racist language 49 years ago, when he was a schoolboy.
“What interests me here is that this story didn’t really get much traction anywhere else. It didn’t even make much of a splash on social media. Only The Guardian and the BBC were interested.”
The former Top Gear host said the BBC’s coverage of Mr Farage was, on its own, “fair and impartial,” but he questioned the motivation behind selecting it for prominence.
Jeremy Clarkson often uses his Sun column to criticise the BBC
|
AMAZON“If they received word that the leader of the Green Party had been a naughty boy at school, would they have put that on the Six O’Clock News? I’ll let you answer that one for yourselves,” he wrote.
Mr Clarkson also turned his attention to a recent BBC Panorama investigation which sent an undercover reporter with a hidden camera into a London police station to “expose” what producers described as misogyny and racism in Scotland Yard.
“That programme will have been complicated to produce, and permission would have been necessary from the highest levels for those hidden cameras,” he said.
“Oh sure, they ended up with an off-duty officer, after five pints, saying that he didn’t much care for Algerians. But think of all the stories that they chose NOT to cover before alighting on this one.”
He questioned whether the BBC would deploy “subterfuge and cunning and secret surveillance to infiltrate a Sharia court,” once again telling readers to “think for yourself.”
Mr Clarkson concluded that the BBC is not biased in what it says, but in “what it chooses not to say.”
The column then shifted to money laundering in the UK, which Mr Clarkson said “beggars belief,” claiming the criminal market is worth £100 billion.
“It’s not just drugs,” he wrote. “It’s people smuggling and illegal firearms and computer hacking.”
He argued that, meanwhile, police in the UK are “arresting people for sending tweets or saying something horrid about transgenderists, which means the real criminals are free to go about their business completely unmolested.”
One such “real criminal,” he suggested, is “an impossibly beautiful Russian agent called Ekaterina Zhdanova.”
“On the face of it, she owns boutique hotels and upmarket watch shops around Europe, but in reality, she takes the money earned nefariously on the streets of Europe and converts it into untraceable cryptocurrency,” he said.
“The eye-watering profits from this operation are then used by the Russian state to fund terrorist groups, espionage operations and the war in Ukraine.”
However, he said all hope is not lost. “The UK’s National Crime Agency set up something called Operation Destabilise and it’s getting results.”
Mr Clarkson revealed that 128 arrests have been made and tens of millions of pounds confiscated, adding that Zhdanova is currently awaiting trial in France.
“It’s strange,” he wrote. “We have it in our minds that the modern-day police and their colleagues in Border Force are a bunch of overweight BLT+ enthusiasts, but when you read about Operation Destabilise it does put a bit of hope in your heart that all is not lost.”
Mr Clarkson then turned to Rachel Reeves’ “terrible” Budget. “As we know, Rachel Reeves never makes the same mistake twice,” he said. “She likes to make it four or five times.”
He criticised plans to spend an extra £5 million on school libraries, writing: “Libraries?! Who uses those any more? She may as well have given the cash to the country’s town criers.”
A vocal advocate for British farmers, Mr Clarkson bought his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire farm 2008 and began farming it himself in 2019.
His hit Amazon Prime series has since made him a prominent champion for the sector.
The presenter has also led farm protests himself, including a major demonstration in November 2024 against proposed inheritance tax changes.
With that background, he weighed in on a recent family farm tax protest, and criticised organisers despite insisting, “I DON’T like to criticise farmers.”
“…but they did make a schoolboy error at their family farm tax protest in London this week,” he wrote.
“They’d worked on the planning for months but at the eleventh hour, presumably after an order from Sadiq Khan, the Metropolitan Police announced that tractors would not be allowed on Whitehall.
“Anyone could have seen that one coming.”
The farmers advocate concluded with ansuggestion about how the ban could have been avoided: “Drape the tractors in Palestinian flags. Then they’d have been welcomed with open arms,” he said.