Jeremy Clarkson demands ‘thank you letter’ from people on benefits

The former Top Gear and Grand Tour star runs Diddly Squat Farm and The Farmer’s Dog pub here in Oxfordshire, where he also lives.

Mr Clarkson has now made comments about those who claim benefits in his latest column for The Sunday Times.

The 66-year-old turned his attention to Personal Independence Payment and wider welfare spending.

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Mr Clarkson, who has turned his Chadlington farm into the setting for hit Prime Video series Clarkson’s Farm, argued taxpayers should receive regular messages of gratitude from people whose benefits are funded by their work.

In the piece, Mr Clarkson contrasted the “oodles of gratitude” he says he gets from his dogs with what he claimed was a lack of thanks from people on benefits.

He suggested that, when payments go out, each claimant could be given the email address of a randomly selected working person and told to send a detailed message explaining how they had spent the money that week.

Mr Clarkson wrote: “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.

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“And they are told that unless a proper and genuine email is sent, thanking the working person for their generosity, the benefits will stop.

“And I’m not talking about a cursory ‘thanks mate’. I want fulsomeness. I want to hear what they’ve done with the £194 I gave them that week.”

At present, Mr Clarkson wrote, “people who work hard” are helping to “feed, clothe and entertain those who won’t work at all”, but “get nothing in return”.

He went on to imagine an effusive note from a benefits claimant telling a taxpayer it was “so kind” of them to go to work every day so that they did not have to, and thanking them for being able to buy “an even bigger television” with the cash.

Mr Clarkson concluded the column by suggesting that the prospect of having to send weekly thank-you emails might lead some people receiving PIP to decide “they don’t have a head-based neurodivergence issue after all”.

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The broadcaster’s comments come amid a national political row over the future of disability benefits and adult social care funding, with ministers and local leaders debating tax rises, reforms to PIP assessments and changes to the welfare system.

Series five of Clarkson’s Farm was released on Prime Video in June, continuing to chart Mr Clarkson’s battles with bad weather, regulations and local bureaucracy.

Filming is already underway on series six, keeping cameras in Oxfordshire with a release date expected to be set for 2027.