Jezza And The Excess

You can always tell when the Daily Mail is jealous of other papers’ exclusives – they rehash them and re-publish with the minimum of attribution. So it was today with the lifting of a Sunday Mirror splash on uncrowned king of Petrolheadery Jeremy Clarkson, which fits the Dacre righteousness agenda like a glove.

Jezza is alleged to be having an affair with – shock horror – a woman who is not his wife. And the woman in question is otherwise single, with the clincher that she is blonde. Er, big deal. If Clarkson had been a relentless peddler of family values in the style of the Mail’s legendarily foul mouthed editor, there may have been a story in this, but he isn’t, so there ain’t one.

There’s far more to pick over in the itinerary of the Top Gear Live tour which Jezza and his pals James May and Richard Hammond have been presenting around the world recently. You want shameless excess? Five hundred quid a night hotel in Oslo, two cars just to take three presenters to a nearby convention centre, five star hotel in Brisbane, one thousand quid a night hotel in Surfers’ Paradise, and then all the bar and restaurant bills – now that’s really bad.

Small wonder the Beeb are stressing that the tour was not billed to them and not funded by license payers’ cash at all. And Clarkson openly parading his smoking habit, too. It’s too tacky for words.

And to make matters worse, the Super Soaraway Currant Bun has run a lame spoiler to try and cover the Mirror story while promoting Jezza – one of their own columnists. That’s doubly tacky.

[UPDATE April 5: the Express has now joined in, and predictably, they are a day behind everybody else. Bizarrely, the piece tells of Jezza "pictured yesterday on holiday in the Caribbean with ... his wife", but uses a stock photo of Clarkson instead. Not that the Desmond press would sink to lifting copy from the previous day's editions of their competitors, or be too tight to stump up for photos - perish the thought!]