The World According to Clarkson (29 page)

A few years ago the Germans, the Finns and the Swedes had a whip-round and gave their tiny neighbour some uniforms, a couple of patrol boats and a Piper aircraft, but as for guns – well, the Estonians have an Uzi they bought from the Israelis.

In a conflict with Iraq, Estonia would have been a pleasant but fairly useless ally. As would Azerbaijan, which joined the coalition even though it, too, lost its army fourteen months ago and it hasn’t turned up yet in Iraq.

President Heydar Aliyev had tried to make life bearable for his troops and even set up a charitable foundation so they could be paid. But as winter drew in last year the soldiers left their barracks, saying they were sick of living without heat and with only an hour of running water a day.

Still, at least Bush could rely on Honduras. Sure, its adult population is the same size as Sheffield’s and yes, most people live in houses made from sugar-cane stalks. But there is a modern, well-equipped army and I’m sure the special ‘jungle squad’ would have been useful in Iraq’s desert.

As it turned out, however, the Hondurans never turned up. Nor did the Japanese, who were planning on sending 1,000 peacekeepers. In the wake of last week’s big bomb, the Japanese decided it would be better if they just stayed at home. India and Turkey followed suit.

South Korea is also unwilling to commit, but I guess
it’s hard to worry about events 10,000 miles away when your next-door neighbour is pointing a thermonuclear weapon through your letter box.

As a result, the team of nations in Iraq looks as though it has been picked by the primary school kid who got to go second. France won the toss and nicked all the big, good players leaving Uncle Sam with the Ukrainians who spend 30 per cent of their GDP on the military (47p), the Romanians who are busy training the new Iraqi police force, the Hungarians who have sent 140 logistics experts, the New Zealanders who have sent some bandages, and the Bulgarians who, presumably, look after the umbrellas.

The Czechs sent 400 policemen but the men have got notes from their mothers and will be going home next month – and it’s likely to be the same story with the Italians, who are always up for a fight. Until it starts.

I think everyone with their head screwed on the right way round knew that it would be jolly easy for America’s enormous military machine to topple the Ba’ath party in Iraq, even without the Honduran jungle squad and Estonia’s second-hand patrol boat.

But we also knew it would be very hard to sort out the mess afterwards. And sure enough, every time the Poles or the Dutch rebuild a water pipe or a power station, half a dozen Talibans drive their Toyotas into it.

It took nearly 80 years to pacify Northern Ireland, where there are only two factions, while in Iraq there are about 120, who can all trace their vendettas back to the Garden of Eden.

To make matters worse, there’s not much cohesion among the occupying forces either. One minute a burly Australian comes into your house looking for nuclear weapons, the next a Ukrainian pops round to see if you’d like a job in the police force – and then you get shot in the face by a Shi’ite because a Sunni saw you talking to a Norwegian sergeant about that Bulgarian bird in the wireless section.

Meanwhile, the 130,000 Americans with their Apache gunships and their limitless supply of money are bogged down, trying to work out if Saddam Hussein had anything more dangerous in his chemical cupboard than aspirin.

The war is over, said Bush. Well, you may have stopped playing, matey, but trust me on this: what you have left behind are 187 different teams all playing different games on the same pitch.

Sunday 16 November 2003

One day, many years ago, when I was a trainee reporter on a local newspaper in the socialist republic of South Yorkshire, a woman telephoned the newsdesk to say her house ‘were disgusting’.

I went round, and sure enough it was very dirty and full of equally dirty children, some of whom belonged to the caller.

She wasn’t sure which ones exactly, but she was very sure of one thing: cockroaches were burrowing into her head, through her ears, and laying eggs behind her eyes.

She wasn’t mad. But she was thick. Thick enough to believe she was thin enough to wear a miniskirt. And thick enough to believe her head was full of maggots when, in fact, it was full of nothing at all.

She wasn’t unusual, either. Every day back then I would meet people who knew only to eat when hungry and lash out at anyone who they suspected might be ‘looking at them’. People, in other words, with less capacity for logical thought than a dishwasher.

They haven’t gone away. Just the other night I was watching a police programme. A young man had been apprehended after he was seen driving erratically and he was, not to put too fine a point on it, incapable of either coherent thought or coherent speech.

When the policeman asked if the car was his, he looked like he’d been asked to explain the atomic properties of lithium. He had the IQ of a daffodil, the conversational ability of a cushion and the intelligence of his mother who, at the time, was standing outside the police car shouting ‘Oi, pig!’ over and over again.

And yet because this man wasn’t a vet or a vicar he could be selected for jury service. Yup, this man, and the woman with cockroach eggs in her forehead, are deemed bright enough to determine the outcome of what might well be a multi-million-pound fraud trial.

Now you may not have noticed, but in between the end of the last parliament and the Queen’s speech, when everyone was focused on the big issues of foundation hospitals and university funding, the government was struggling to shove through its new Criminal Justice Bill.

The held view is that trial by jury is the cornerstone of British democracy and if you take it away the whole building will come crashing down.

But actually, when push comes to shove, you don’t give a stuff about democracy. If it means getting a few more burglars off the street, damn fairness and decency.

What you want is a system that works. In the wee small hours you can admit that previous convictions should be made known to the court before the case is tried.

You also know that the jury system is a farce.

How can you let a woman who thinks she has insects in her head decide whether it’s legal to move a pension fund through the Cayman Islands? In certain parts of
Somerset I suspect that imbecile and embezzle sound exactly the same.

And it’s not just fraud either. Back in the olden days when a man was accused of stealing a goat you listened to people who’d seen him do it and made up your mind.

But now you have to have a basic grasp of forensic science.

I can see why Labour MPs are so concerned. They must see many idiots in their surgeries. But the ones who go to a surgery are the gleaming white tip of the iceberg. I’m talking about the sort of people who have no clue what an MP is or what he does; people who you thought existed only in a Viz cartoon.

The Tories should be concerned, too, though. I know one upright shires lady who sat on a jury and said afterwards: ‘Well, I could tell the little devil was guilty. You could tell the moment he walked into the court.’

A jury is supposed to be made up of your peers, and peers means someone who is equal in standing or rank. Well, I’m sorry, but on that basis the man with the allegedly stolen car on television the other night could only be trusted to try plants.

Terrifyingly, my equal, in terms of someone who writes about cars and occasionally appears on television, is Stephen Bayley. And I wouldn’t want to be tried by him either.

At the moment a jury trial has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with sheer blind luck. But what do we replace it with?

The judge? Ooh, no. Professional jurors? What sort
of person’s going to sign up for that? It wouldn’t even work, I fear, if we tested the heads of those called.

Because all the bright, intelligent people would pretend to be stupid so they could go home.

I think you may be worried where this is going to end. There’s talk at the moment of allowing television cameras into the courts. So how long will it be before the viewers at home are asked to ‘press the red button now’ and vote? You read it here first.

Sunday 30 November 2003

I’ve had a horribly busy week and quite the last thing I needed was a directive from the European Parliament that I must get passports for my three donkeys.

I tried to argue that I have no plans to take them abroad, or even out of their paddock, but it was no good. Council Directive 90/426/EEC says that anyone with any horse, mule or donkey must get a passport. At twenty quid a go.

This was going to be a pain in the backside. Geoff, my grey donkey, is so stubborn that he won’t even go into his stable, so how in the name of all that’s holy was I supposed to get him into one of those photo booths?

I suppose Eddie, who’s a playful soul, might have been up for it but then he’d have pulled a silly face every time the flash went off. And let’s not forget the beautiful Kristen Scott Donkey who, when the pictures were delivered, would have stood there in tears saying ‘they make my nose look too long’.

It turned out that the European Union had thought about this and decided that instead of photographs a simple silhouette drawing would suffice. This makes life easier but I am a trifle worried that silhouettes aren’t a terribly good means of identification.

First of all, if I attempted to draw the outline of a
donkey, it would end up looking like a dog. Everything I draw looks like a dog.

My vet says this is no problem so long as I get the markings in the right place.

‘But what if my donkey has no markings?’ I asked. ‘Quite,’ he said. Small wonder that Princess Anne called the whole scheme a ‘nonsense’.

So what, you might be wondering, is happening here? Why has the EU decided that all equine or asinine species, except those which live in the New Forest or on Dartmoor, must have a photo ID?

Well, and I promise you’re not going to believe this, the idea is that each passport will carry details of the animal’s medical history. This way you’ll know at a glance if it has been fed harmful drugs, should you decide to eat it.

Oh good. So, if one day I suddenly come over all peckish and decide that Geoff’s front leg would go well with the veg and gravy, I’ll be able to make sure that his previous owner did not feed him a drug that would make me grow two heads.

I think it’s worth pausing here for a moment. You see, over the years I have eaten a puffin, a snake, a whale (well, a bit of one), a dog, a crocodile and an anchovy. But I would sooner eat a German than tuck into my donkeys. And I don’t think I’m alone on this one either.

For sure, there are problems when a horse dies. You are no longer allowed to bury it in your garden, so you must rely on the local hunt to come and take it away.

But what happens when hunting is banned?

Is the EU saying that we have to break out the carving knife and warm up the sauce?

I don’t think so. In Britain we have a line in the sand when it comes to what we will and what we will not put in our mouths. We will eat rats, so long as they’re called ‘chicken madras’. But we will not eat horses.

Unfortunately, however, the line in the sands of Europe is a little further away.

And consequently those buggers will eat anything.

In France you often find horse on the menu and in Germany, as we discovered last week, it’s not against the law to eat your dinner guests. Furthermore, I know they make salami out of the few donkeys in Spain that have not been hurled to their deaths from the nearest tower block.

Over there across the water there is perhaps some argument for equine passports.

Being able to tell if the horse had been on ‘horse’ at some point in its life would be reassuring. You need to know if the pony’s been smacked before it’s smoked.

But do you believe for one minute that the farmers of Andalusia are actually going to act on the EU directive? Or do you think the letter will simply be fed to the mule?

That was my first reaction, I must admit. I thought it was a stupid joke and if I did nothing it would go away. But no. It turns out that in Britain, the only country in Europe where we don’t eat Mr Ed or Eeyore, local authorities will be employing ass monitors to scour the
countryside for unregistered donkeys and horses. And owners will be fined for non-compliance.

Again. Can you see that happening in Europe? I can’t. I’ve seen those massive aquatic vacuum cleaners that Spain calls a fishing fleet pulling into the port of La Coruña and unloading fish about 2 mm long. And there wasn’t an EU inspector within a million miles.

I can’t even see it working in Germany. The Germans love a rule more than anyone, but when they tried to introduce a similar scheme a few years ago only 50 per cent of the nation’s horses were registered. And all the inspectors who were sent out to check on the others mysteriously never came back.

Sunday 7 December 2003

It is traditional at this time of year for newspaper columnists to say how much they despise just about everything to do with Christmas. Sadly, this is not an option for me.

Naturally there are one or two minor irritations. I don’t, for instance, like it when someone throws a model aeroplane in your face the moment you walk through the door of Hamleys. And my wife and I have an uncanny knack of buying one another the same thing every year. It’s why we have two video cameras and two dogs.

But mostly I get on well with Christmas. My fairy lights work straight out of the box. My tree does not drop needles.I don’t eat or drink too much. I like getting long letters in cards from people I haven’t seen all year. I enjoy the enforced bonhomie of New Year’s Eve.

I find it satisfying to wrap presents. I like turkey curry in February.
The Great Escape
is always worth watching. I don’t have any relatives who wet themselves over lunch. I love seeing the children’s beaming faces at 5 a.m. I see nothing wrong with Christmas jumpers. I am grateful for my new socks.