Jeremy Clarkson was attacked by a green protester last week. He remains unrepentant while his assailant tells John-Paul Flintoff the petrolhead had it coming



Naturally, Jeremy Clarkson had expected some kind of attack. Addressing an assembly of engineering students at Oxford Brookes University last week, he began: “I fully expected to be speaking to you today covered in flour and eggs, like a giant human pancake.”
The Sunday Times columnist and presenter of BBC2’s Top Gear had come to collect an honorary degree, awarded in recognition of his long-standing support for engineering. Only after his speech finished was his dire prediction fulfilled — give or take the odd ingredient — by a woman named Rebecca Lush.



Clarkson had disappeared into a marquee, Lush recalls. “But then he came out again, so I ran after him.” Catching up, she leapt high into the air and copped the motoring writer of the year in the face with a homemade, organic banana meringue. In case you imagined otherwise, that’s not as easy as it sounds: “He’s a bloody huge guy, 6ft 4in. Hitting him in the face was like playing basketball.”

Having completed her mission, Lush, 33, kept moving. “I had to run very fast from a security guard. I don’t know what you can be charged with, legally, for putting a pie on someone — and I had no idea what Clarkson might do.”

In the event, Clarkson’s response was generous. He congratulated his assailant: “Great shot!” The only criticism he offered, while the assembled photographers happily snapped away, was to state that the meringue tasted too sweet.

“It’s unfortunate that I was terribly jet-lagged,” he says now. “Otherwise I would have guessed that something was up when the photographers said, ‘Would you mind stepping over there, because the light is better?’ They knew what was going on. And I have to say that, at the PR level, it was a fantastic result for the environmentalists. One-nil to them.”

But how did it come to this? Why has Clarkson, who brings joy to so many, become the bęte noire of the environmental movement? Why did thousands sign a petition urging Oxford Brookes to withdraw the honour? And what motivated this particular woman to do more than sign up — to bake a banana meringue and convey it far from home to sully the face and robes of a man she’d never met?

Clarkson was nominated for supporting high standards in engineering — something he showed most notably by championing Brunel as the greatest Briton in the BBC series in 2002; and, as a passenger on the last BA Concorde flight a year later, by paraphrasing Neil Armstrong to describe the retirement of that engineering classic: “This is one small step for a man, but one huge leap backwards for mankind.”

But his work has also earned him the ire of the green movement. On Top Gear, Clarkson drove through virgin peat bogs in a 4x4 and tore up road safety information on camera. Racing against colleagues, he drove a Ferrari more or less nonstop from London to Switzerland and was stopped by police for speeding. And in February this year the BBC paid Ł250 in compensation to a parish council in Somerset after Clarkson deliberately rammed a Toyota pick-up into a 30-year-old horse chestnut.

Clarkson is unrepentant. “The parish council is funded by central government, which is funded by me, so it’s my tree. Anyway, there was no damage.”

Environmentalists believe that what Clarkson says and does on screen encourages others to copy him. He recently vowed to kill cyclists “for fun” if they failed to respect the Highway Code — a promise that has provoked furious debate on the pages of cycling magazines and websites.

But Clarkson refuses to accept that he’s a role model. “When people say that to me, I ask, ‘Would you do something just because I did it?’ And they always say no. And I say, ‘Well, if you wouldn’t, then why do you think someone else would?’ ”

All the same, the environmental pressure group Transport 2000 said the decision to honour Clarkson at a serious academic institution was like Scotland Yard paying tribute to the work of Inspector Clouseau. And more than 3,100 people signed that petition: not only environmentalists and members of Oxford council but also staff and students at Oxford Brookes, and workers at the nearby Cowley BMW factory who are angry at his repeated criticism of their former colleagues at MG Rover, which is in administration.

In Lush, Clarkson was confronted by someone whose obsession with cars, though less well known than his, has been no less consuming. The main difference between them is that Clarkson loves motors and Lush hates them.

In 1993 Lush was jailed for four months for her part in protests against road building on Twyford Down. “It wasn’t nice. But the support we got was incredible. It was the first time environmental activists had been sent to prison, and it really inspired people. I received 100 letters a day,” she says.

And what motivated this particular woman to do more than sign up — to bake a banana meringue and convey it far from home to sully the face and robes of a man she’d never met?

Was her journey really necessary?

I hope she cycled all the way.

 

Apparently she did the same to some yank at a conference in the Hague.

Did she cycle across the North Sea too, I wonder?

 

And how did the bananas get from the banana trees to her kitchen?