The BBC are not being entirely honest, as they are about almost everything else. Jeremy Clarkson is a boorish, loudmouthed, prone to racist misunderstandings in his remarks, whose Repton school education should have taught him to know better.

The BBC’s Top Gear producers knew what Clarkson was and encouraged him to behave in this way because they knew from public attitude surveys that many of the UK public share Clarkson’s views. By allowing Clarkson to rampage about with his equally silly co-presenters, the BBC gained viewers of this ilk, including the Prime Minister and his friends in the Chipping Norton set, who are people with more money than sense who perhaps imagine that anything outside of a 60 mile radius of where they live is Outer Mongolia and that anyone who is not like them is an inferior species of human being.

The wider viewership of this uninformative and silly program may or may not have been petrol-heads but a good many of them clearly thought that Clarkson somehow represented them and was able to do outrageous things that they dared not to do.

He has now been sacked and will be replaced; he’ll jump ship and move to another channel, something he planned for long ago. In the end, it will not matter because the BBC itself is on the road to nowhere, and will be replaced with internet television services, more agreeable to audiences of the future.

Perhaps, the Police will now take action against Clarkson, as an example?

John Gelmini