Jeremy Clarkson: London cabs driven by foreigners smell of sick

Jeremy Clarkson has risked fresh controversy after writing in Top Gear magazine that London cabs driven by foreign-born people smell of sick.

Clarkson, who is currently suspended from the show over allegations that he punched a producer, wrote the column for the BBC Worldwide-owned title.

In his column for the March issue, he wrote: “Let’s look at the alternatives to the car. There’s the train, which is extremely expensive. It now costs more to go by rail to Leeds than it does to stay where you are and buy a house. Then there’s the bus, which is full of disease and drunk people who want to stick a knife in your heart. We can discount the bicycle, obviously, which leaves us with one option – get someone else to do the driving.”

He added: “In London, there are two types of driver. You have a chap who has just arrived from a country you’ve never heard of, whose car smells faintly of lavender oil and sick, who doesn’t know where he’s going and can’t get there anyway because he never puts more than £2 worth of fuel in the tank of his car.

“Then you have someone in a suit in a smart black Mercedes S-Class who does know where he’s going and is very polite but he charges around £7,500 a mile.”

Clarkson also criticised the north, saying drivers have to jockey for position “with half a million overseas-registered Dacias which are being driven by people who’ve never experienced tarmac before and think that the speed limit is the top speed of their car. Which is about 42.”

His column is likely to have been written before the “fracas” in Hawes, North Yorkshire, that led to his suspension.

The BBC has launched its investigation into the incident, which is being led by BBC Scotland director Ken MacQuarrie. Clarkson and producer Oisin Tymon are likely to give their accounts of the altercation over the next few days.

It emerged on Tuesday that the BBC is set to clear the use of the word “pikey” in a Top Gear episode.

The corporation came under fire from the Traveller Movement charity, which criticised the corporation’s decision to clear the use of “pikey” as “legitimising the use of a racist word”.