Celebrity Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson’s idea for benefits claimants to write thank you letters to random taxpayers went down like an inheritance tax demand on a farm

Oonagh Keating. Updated August 4th, 2026

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In news that will shock precisely nobody, Jeremy Clarkson has come up with a hot take somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, which displays a spectacular failure to understand the benefits system, plays to the baying mob, and scores full marks for hypocrisy.

In his Times column, he explained that the expense and difficulty of owning dogs is offset by the level of gratitude they show their owner – in this case, him. He demands the same level of gratitude from people claiming benefits, in the form of a weekly letter to be sent to a random worker.

This was how he phrased it.

‘As I’m sure you’ve heard, there are now more than a million young people in this country who are not working. They’re not even looking for work. They’re just sitting at home all day, gormlessly watching shortform nonsense on their massive vulgarsonic televisions.
And what makes this especially dispiriting is that if they’ve got ants in their pants, or ADHD as it’s now called.’

‘It’s very simple. Every week, when the benefits are paid, the recipient is given the email address of a randomly selected person who is getting up and going to work every day. And they are told that unless a proper and genuine email is sent, thanking the working person for their generosity, the benefits will stop.’

Although the post is behind a paywall, and hardly a tempting enough prospect to encourage most people to get out the debit card, the gist of his rage-bait made it to Twitter.

There were several problems with Clarkson’s bad take, and tweeters soon pointed them out.

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