Jeremy Clarkson targeted in manure dump by climate campaigners.

The Guardian

The simmering war that has long been waged between environmentalists and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson escalated today when seven women from the pressure group Climate Rush arrived at his £2m Cotswolds house and dumped six bags of horse manure on his drive and front lawn.

"Clarkson was not there but we left several steaming piles of manure and a message saying 'this is what you're landing us in'," said Tamsin Omond, one of the activists from Climate Rush. "We targeted Clarkson because of his blasé attitude towards climate change, as illustrated byhis recent drive to the Arctic," she added .

The seven campaigners, dressed as suffragettes, arrived at the automatically opening wrought iron gates of Clarkson's Cotswold mansion outside Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, in a van fuelled by chip-fat oil. No one answered the door, but the police were called.

The Top Gear presenter, a self confessed libertarian, has made a name by promoting speed and antagonising environmentalists. "What's wrong with global warming? We might lose Holland but there are other places to go on holiday," he wrote once in the Sun. On Top Gear, he has also lauded naturalist David Bellamy, who has disputed that man-made warming exists.

His views on people standing up for environmental causes have offended a wide cross section of Britain. He once described ramblers as "urban communists", cyclists as "Lycra Nazis", and people working for transport pressure group Transport 2000 as "ugly". Women, ethnic minorities and others have all taken offence. Car workers blamed him in part for the collapse of MG Rover after bad reviews of the company's cars.

His attitude to nature is also eccentric. He has questioned why Britain has so many hills, proposed that great white sharks should be eaten to extinction, been excited at the thought of Birmingham being covered by a glacier, rammed a car into a tree and driven up Ben Tongue, a Scottish mountain, in a 4x4.

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