Top Gear, Clarkson’s other platform for hilarious politically incorrect comments, has long been a showcase for what we could accurately describe as The Three Ages Of Conservative Man. At the bottom rung of the ladder is Richard Hammond, the forty-something boy racer. Hammond is – or acts – young enough to know that you probably shouldn’t insult Mexicans on your television programme, but he lacks the backbone to tell Clarkson to wind his neck in. He wears beads around his neck and looks like a cross between an undergraduate from 1997 and a vole. Clarkson is the second level of this trilogy, the would-be ageing rock and roller, desperate to squeeze out the last of his testosterone before the well runs dry. He plays the drums. He once drove a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool on Top Gear. In short, he wishes he were – or believes himself to be – some sort of spiritual reincarnation of Keith Moon, all of which would be fine were it not for the fact that Moon, although one if the greatest rock drummers that ever lived, was also a wife-beating, alcoholic, chronically selfish arsehole.

Then, simultaneously at the top and bottom of the tree, comes James May. May is the elderly Tory grandee, the Top Gear presenter most likely to end up in the House Of Lords. He drives slowly, like old people do, and they laugh at him. He is often ridiculously over-apologetic. He has an eccentric haircut, beloved of the sort of hereditary stately pile owner who blows his inheritance trying to keep his monument to rural imperialism alive. He plays the piano. James May is also three years younger than Jeremy Clarkson. The Three Ages Of Conservative Man on Top Gear are a myth, just like so many of the other lines, which are expressed both explicitly and implicitly, on this particular programme.

The notion that Top Gear lies about some of its subject matter – and most of the lying comes on subjects that don’t fit with the programme’s military-fetishising, ultra-Conservative worldview – is nothing new, and neither is the idea that critics of it don’t have valid points because the programme is “only entertainment”. The comedian Stewart Lee covered this matter more skilfully than any of us ever could, but the concept is worth thinking about, because it isn’t only hilarious politically incorrect jokes that fall into this category. This category consists, as we mentioned earlier, of jokes and mild racism, but also of lying about the performance of products that don’t fit the Top Gear worldview and also of the denial of climate change and the destruction of environmentally sensitive spots.

That, however, is Top Gear – about as rock and roll as a fifty year old man with a medallion around his neck in a provincial nightclub at two in the morning. Clarkson’s persona, however, has spread beyond this. He is now, whether we like it or not, a voice of a generation – a generation which may or may not have once wanted to have died before it got old, but has instead turned into an even more reactionary version of its parents, a generation that decided not to try and change the world with such ideas as idealism, but instead made a decision to wear how old it had become as a badge of honour. It is the generation which decided that the free education that it received was too expensive for its children, who instead will have to run up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt just to get a degree which may or may not have the value of a strip of toilet paper. The generation which over-inflated house prices to the extent that first-time buyers couldn’t afford to buy a place to live any more. The generation which reacted to a global financial crisis brought about by runaway neo-capitalism by voting in an even more neo-capitalist government than the one we already had. The generation that decided to popularise unpaid internships as a way into desirable jobs through tapping into young people’s desperation to get a job that they might enjoy. In other words, Generation Cunt.

Even if we accept the disingenuous “it’s just a joke/persona” argument as having any weight… it wasn’t funny. It was the sound of a middle-aged man farting a string of words to form a vaguely coherent sentence. If comedy is about the timing or, indeed, about anything other than saying something that will wind up the wrong people, then Clarkson failed. Perhaps, to some, it was “outrageous”, but being “outrageous” is so easy that even a child could do it. You can try it yourself. Lean out of your window and shout something about a black child with learning disabilities. It’s really not that hard. Others might argue that he merely articulates what other people daren’t say any more. Other people, that is, apart from sections of the Conservative Party and daily newspapers, that is. One of the few pleasures in life to come from our previous Conservative government was a the daily stream of horse-shit to spew from the mouths of John Major’s back-benchers. Cameron, though, has got his mob on a tighter rein and in any case, why should they bother opening their mouths when they have somebody with considerably greater public exposure than them to vocalise their internal monologues for them?

So, should we be angry about Jeremy Clarkson’s hilarious politically incorrect comments on The One Show yesterday evening? No, of course we shouldn’t. Clarkson is a prick, of course – a one man bullshit machine who delights in you getting angry with his hilarious politically incorrect comments. Getting angry at him is like getting angry at an open sewer because it smells of week-old, rancid diarrhoea. We should, however, be angry at the millions of people that feel the same as he does, at the fact that people like him are currently bending the ears of our policy-makers, and that those policy-makers were voted in by an electorate for whom statements like “I’d have them all shot” equates something approaching a cogent world-view. We should be furious that our society is being carved up by the richest, and that our public services are being dismantled before our very eyes. To that extent, Jeremy Clarkson isn’t the problem – he’s little more than a symptom of a country that is becoming a worse and worse place to live in with each passing day.