Confession Time.

I’m not good at predictions.

For much of my younger life, I had a vague feeling that I would die at the age of 48. Don’t get me wrong, this was not so much a dramatic foretelling of a grizzly end, as a kind of settled feeling that my future resting place was aware of the date that would join ‘1959’ in the bit that followed my name. And that date, aside from the last 13 days of 2007, was 2008.

On December 17th 2008, the last day of my 49th year, (meaning the last day that this prediction could have any relevance), I found myself in enormous pain on a blood-wagon, having broken my shoulder in 7 places in a strange skiing accident right at the top of the longest black run in Europe. Whatever else I was thinking of, it was not my fatalistic thought. Just getting to the bottom without passing out was uppermost in my mind, followed, much further down the scale, by wondering if my suspiciously cheap holiday insurance would cover whatever came next.

What came next was an interview with a brusque French doctor who stared at the x-ray in the satisfied manner of a man who has had one too many false alarms to deal with in his day, and is therefore not unpleased to be dealing with the real thing, and who then pronounced that he would call a helicopter, and send me down to the main hospital at Grenobles, where I would be duly put to sleep and mended.

It was only when I was looking at the date on the form I was signing with my good arm that I clocked first that tomorrow was my birthday and, secondly, exactly which birthday it was. Suddenly, into my addled brain poured all the notions of things that might happen in the next nine and a half hours. Helicopter crash, obviously. Terrible mistake on the anaesthetic dosage. Heart stoppage on the operating table. Being left in a freezing lift. Being fed an off andouilette. On it went.

So I simply asked him not to worry about the chopper and just to strap it up, after which I would ‘think about it’ at leisure. It turned out to be a great decision, according to the English surgeon who looked at it a week later.

‘Saved yourself years of trouble,’ he said. ‘It’s already knitting itself together nicely, which it certainly wouldn’t be if they had plated it up and cut through all your soft tissue.’

So the only reason I have as much as 85% movement in my left arm is that I am rubbish at predictions.

Here’s another one.

I have always said that, come what may, Jeremy Clarkson can say what he wants about anything he likes and, because he is a money machine, and money speaks louder than words, he will survive the experience. ‘Just a bloke thing’, we will say. Just Jeremy.

Like you, I have my own views on the Netflix series he was referring to in his Sun column. Probably like you, they are based on almost no knowledge, and are therefore utterly irrelevant, especially to anyone beyond my dinner table. Overwhelmingly, I just feel rather sad for the whole wider family, the Sussexes included, and a little bit sad for us as an already beleaguered country.

Probably also like you, I eventually read the offending clip. My living is made out of words, but I can find nothing in it that persuades me that it isn’t an incitement of violence towards women, and fully objectionable. To admit to loathing someone even more than you loathe a child murderer is eye-catching indeed. A friend wrote an excellent blog on Linkedin yesterday, which makes all the points that you would like it to make, and then ends with this, where he picks up about Clarkson and the Sun knowing precisely what they were doing, and for whom they were doing it.

 And feeding the market for hate has a lasting negative impact, although not on The Sun or on Jeremy Clarkson.

The Sun cancels the column, having raised its profile. Job done. Next week, Clarkson will return to his keyboard as a self-styled (and well-paid) rogue. Meanwhile, others will continue to be affected by it, because hatred published in the mainstream media shifts the acceptable boundaries of discourse. Bluntly: if I read it in The Sun, if Clarkson says it out loud, then it must be okay for me to say it. People will feel liberated to be ruder, coarser, to go out of their way to insult people who they disagree with, or who just look and
act a little different. We will have become, as a nation, just a little bit
nastier.
 
And that’s when the rest of us have to say: this is not acceptable.
 
There will always be people ready to hate. And there will always be individuals, and newspapers, ready to profit from that. When The Sun, or anyone, wants to tug public discourse into the rhetoric of hatred, that’s the time for the rest of us, who want to live in a civilized society, to call it out.
 
That’s why I, like many others, have diverted from my usual LinkedIn topics to write this.
 
In his column, Clarkson wrote that “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.”
 
No, Jeremy, we don’t. We really don’t.

So I hope my second prediction is wrong, and that both Murdoch and Amazon come to the conclusion that there is enough hate in this world of ours without their extremely talented, but utterly unacceptable columnist/presenter adding to it.

Until that time, pathetic though it may be, neither company get a penny from me.