Clarkson on: flogging

For three reasons, I've always had my doubts about Prince Charles. First, it's said he talks to plants - a singularly unrewarding experience, because all they do in return is die. Mind you, my plants also die when I don't talk to them, when I water them and when I don't water them. My garden is a herbaceous version of Fred West's cellar.

Second, he believes in all sorts of alternative medicine which, from personal experience, I know to be nonsense. I have had a man stick needles in my ears to cure hay fever, but I sneezed so much they all shot out. And when I have a hangover, I could eat dock leaves till the cows come home but you just can't beat a Disprin.

And third, he is separated from the world's second most beautiful woman.

Against this sort of background, it is easy to see why I was on Urquhart's side in To Play The King. But now Prince Charles has shown himself not only to be a decent cove, but also the kind of leader that this country needs. Unlike John Major, he obviously has rather more than two pubic hairs in his underpants. In fact, he must be hung like a horse because he has actually dared to take on the tiny, tiny minority of homosexualists who sit around in Camden telling everyone else not only what they can and can't say, but also what they can and can't think.

"97 per cent of the population daren’t voice an opinion in case someone from the Camden thought police is listening"

Time and again in recent years I've been cornered by these wishy-washy liberals who think that the motor car is the seven-headed beast from Revelations, and there's been no way out. My passion is killing the planet and they're on the moral high ground, wagging their fingers.

Well, now the future King of England has given me a royal seal of approval to fight back. So here goes. Women can't drive. Immigrants need to take a driving test before being allowed on the roads in Britain. Old people should have to hand in their licences at the age of 65. And when I meet someone I know to be homosexual, I can't help staring at their bottom, wondering. But most of all, that American boy who went round Singapore spray-painting cars got what was coming to him. Apparently, he'll be scarred for life. Diddums. My heart bleeds.

In pubs throughout the land, round every dinner table and on every golf course, people are whispering to one another about how they think flogging is a good thing.

When I left the house the other morning to find that someone had sawn the rear spoiler off my Escort Cosworth during the night, I was speechless with rage.

To the casual observer, my body language suggested that I had inadvertently spilled some sulphuric acid in my lap.

Now, the politically correct say that the thief, when apprehended, should be taken to court, addressed by his Christian name and let off with a stern warning. I want him beaten to within an inch of his life, and everyone I know who has had a car vandalised thinks the same way.

Apparently, a radio station did some kind of straw poll about that American vandal and found that 97 per cent of its listeners think the Singapore authorities treated him fairly. The other three per cent, by the way, had beards.

Yet if anyone says ‘bring back the birch' on TV or in the papers, they're labelled as far right extremists. So no-one dares do it. Political correctness has stifled discussion and debate in this country to the point where 97 per cent of the population daren't voice an opinion in case someone from the Camden thought police is listening.

But now, thanks to Prince Charles, you can go home tonight, beat your kids, eat a rare steak, go out in your V8-powered car, sleep with a woman without using a condom and then have a Capstan Full Strength. In other words, you should do what you've always done.

Only now you've no need to be embarrassed about it.