Jeremy Clarkson has faced a backlash after suggesting that taxpayers had funded former Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s ‘entire life’.
Rayner, who also served as Housing Secretary, resigned from all three of her senior roles after it transpired she hadn’t paid the right level of stamp duty on her seaside home in Hove.
However Clarkson, a TV host turned farmer and publican, was criticised for ‘hypocrisy’ for drawing attention to Rayner’s state education and career in local government.
The former Top Gear host wrote on X yesterday: ‘We paid for Angela Rayner’s education. We paid her wages when she worked for the local council. We paid her wages when she became an MP.
‘We even paid the settlement that enabled her to buy a house. Tax payers have funded every aspect of her entire life.’
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Rayner stepped down on Friday after the PM’s ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, concluded that she had breached the ministerial code.
Sir Keir Starmer has since brought forward a cabinet reshuffle, promoting foreign secretary David Lammy to the deputy role.
But Clarkson’s remarks have sparked a backlash against him, with some suggesting the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire host was unfair to make this observation given his comparatively privileged background.
Clarkson was educated at the independent Repton School, from where he claims to have been expelled.
The former BBC host typically posts on A-Level results day in August a reminder that he only achieved a C and two Us.
One wrote: ‘What a loathsome bit of diatribe. Attacking Rayner for being a state educated public servant before entering politics is ghoulish. Clarkson attended two private schools and then fell upwards his whole life as a result. He’s unfit to lace Rayner’s boots.’
Others pointed out that Clarkson himself had drawn a salary paid for by the license fee during his 13-year stint hosting Top Gear.
‘For twenty four years, while you ‘worked’ at the BBC, every single one of us who buys a TV licence paid your wages, whether we liked it or not. You should sit this one out, you gigantic whining hypocrite’, one wrote.
Another said: ‘Jeremy Clarkson, here, who built his entire career on license fee payers. But he reckons he deserves the millions he made from the BBC. While Rayner did not deserve £16k pa when she was a social worker.’
Clarkson, who owns Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire, previously led protests against Labour’s agricultural policies, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ plans to remove the inheritance tax exemptions on some farms.
On a demonstration in central London last year, Clarkson told the BBC he had acquired his 1,000 acre estate near Chipping Norton ‘to shoot’ but that it would incidentally save him tax.
Some responses to Clarkson’s post said there was a hypocrisy in his singling out Rayner for tax evasion having previously complained about taxes himself.
An X user wrote: ‘Jeremy Clarkson, who has spent much of the last year protesting and whinging about the government closing an inheritance tax loophole he was hoping to exploit, wants to lecture you about tax evasion. Utterly hysterical hypocrisy.’
It comes after the Clarkson’s Farm host shared an update saying the computer systems at his pub, the Farmer’s Dog, had been targeted by the same hackers who sabotaged Marks and Spencer.
He wrote in the Sun that criminals had taken £27,000 from his business.
Metro has contacted Jeremy Clarkson’s representatives for comment.
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