Guido Fawked - Tank Stunt Fail

The support of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog for the beleaguered Jeremy Clarkson has been unwavering, despite Staines holding Irish nationality and Jezza having been accused of a racially aggravated assault on Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon, who is, er Irish. This has culminated in a typically gauche publicity stunt today involving a tank.

Fart in lift Inquiry outgunned by reality

Or rather it wasn’t a tank, but a “self-propelled gun”. The problem with this spiffing wheeze was that one, the Fawkes folks generously told everyone what they were doing well in advance, two, the petition to “Bring Back Clarkson” had not reached the magic million signatures first thing today, leading to frantic last-minute publicity, and three, the presence of the tank was rumbled by the deeply subversive Guardian.

All of that was bad enough, but it soon became clear that the Fawkes campaign had not developed necessarily to their advantage as news came through that the tank had decided not to play its full part: it had broken down en route from somewhere near the Angel (that’s Islington, for those of you from out of town) to its intended destination outside the BBC, where Top Gear, er, is not filmed, actually. So it turned up late.

It was claimed that the tank was to be driven by The Stig, the anonymous driver from Top Gear, but, not for the first time with the Fawkes rabble, this was not true: someone in a very cheap and nasty Stig-like outfit was sitting on the tank, but was not driving it. And, despite the banners on the tank’s sides proclaiming the Fawkes brand, the best they could do was Staines’ tame gofer, the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole.

Master Cole had, though, put on his Very Important And Expensive Honestly Coat, to show that he was to be taken seriously, at least by the more credulous part of the Fourth Estate. However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, it soon became clear that the buffoon Cole, while telling that the rotten Beeb should reinstate someone who has not yet been de-instated, was finding some of the questioning difficult.

This was reported by Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News, who chose not to take Cole’s claim to be A Real And Authoritative Proper Journalist, So There at face value, but to do what real journalists do, and ask a few of those hard questions. Was the Fawkes support for Jezza totally unequivocal, even if he had been shown to have taken part in a racially aggravated assault? Were there to be no barriers to presenters’ behavioural mis-steps?

“Their view seems to be that Clarkson must stay at all costs” concluded Thomson. And the man from Channel 4 didn’t ask if all the instances of “M Mouse”, “O B Laden”, “E Fudd”, “O-W Kenobi” and “Lord Lucan” had been stripped out of that petition. In any case, Cole and his pals are too late: the evidence has been gathered and from last night’s rant at the Roundhouse, Jezza believes he’s out. End of story.

And the Fawkes rabble still have to get their tank back to Islington without it breaking down again and perhaps getting them a ticket. Another fine mess, once again.