Jeremy Clarkson reveals traumatic advice from mum after he became ‘suicidal wreck’

Jeremy Clarkson has always proven to be something of a divisive figure.

While the motoring journalist turned farmer is undoubtedly one of the most popular TV presenters and columnists working in the UK, he’s also got a rather sizable ‘hatedom’.

Some dislike his dismissive attitude to climate change, others think he’s a plain old boor, and there are those who’ve never forgiven him for writing that column about Meghan Markle.

It seems, however, that long before he started appearing on TV and in tabloids, Clarkson’s already had a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way.

Indeed, Clarkson admitted in his column for The Sun this week that he was bullied while in school.

However, when he went to his mum, Shirley Clarkson, to complain about this, rather than consoling her son, she had some rather shocking advice for him.

‘When I was a kid, I sobbed to [my mother] one night that everyone at school was bullying me,’ Clarkson wrote.

‘She replied: “Well, if everyone is bullying you, you must be doing something wrong.”’

Clarkson, clearly aware of how this reads, then joked ‘she’d be arrested for even thinking such a ridiculous thought.’

Clarkson has previously shared some of the traumatic experiences he had to endure while attending Repton School in Derbyshire.

‘I was thrown on an hourly basis into the ice plunge pool, dragged from my bed in the middle of the night and beaten, made to lick the lavatories clean and all the usual humiliations that public school used back then to turn a small boy into a gibbering, sobbing, suicidal wreck,’ he wrote in a 2015 column for The Sunday Times.

‘In the first two years the older boys broke pretty much everything I owned.

‘They glued my records together, snapped my compass, ate my biscuits, defecated in my tuck box, and they cut my trousers in half with a pair of garden shears.’

Despite this, Clarkson claims that following his mum’s advice helped make him the man he is today.

‘After my mother said I was being bullied because I was doing something wrong, I worked out that I was a bit of a prig,’ he wrote in his recent Sun column.

He then says after that he ‘took up smoking, had a few pints and maybe put one of the teachers’ cars in the assembly hall’.

‘After I’d done all that,’ he continued. ‘I had some real laughs, made some great friends and the bullying stopped.’

In fact, Clarkson has continued to heed his mum’s advice even now, explaining how he recently complained to the Clarkson’s Farm director Kit Lynch-Robinson that he had a ‘terrible cold’.

Clarkson had expected Kit to console him, but he instead told the 66-year-old to ‘get a grip’ because the crew was ready and waiting to film.

‘Which is what we did,’ Clarkson wrote.’As a result, work was completed, food was produced, television was made, and the wheels of the economy were greased.’

He finished the column by saying, ‘This is what we should remember when we have problems in our heads.’

And while you can quibble about whether this advice would work for everyone (it wouldn’t), it does sort of explain Clarkson’s career.

The man who made his name mocking electric cars and moaning in the tabloids was raised to believe that problems can be solved by changing yourself rather than demanding the world change.

He grew up being told not to complain, and now he’s an old man telling the world not to complain… although that doesn’t stop him from complaining, of course.