Why this French free speech firebrand is Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite author

The very English owner of Diddly Squat has outed himself as a fan of controversy magnet Michel Houellebecq. The two have much in common

The television presenter-turned-farmer Jeremy Clarkson may seem an unlikely aficionado of serious literature, given that the books he has written include the likes of For Crying Out Loud!, Can You Make This Thing Go Faster and now the Diddly Squat chronicles, which include the latest instalment, Home to Roost, published this week. Yet Clarkson, who is recovering from recent heart surgery, has revealed surprisingly highbrow tastes in a recent Instagram post. 
Offering fans a selection of books that he has recently enjoyed while on holiday, including Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Jimmy Lerner’s You Got Nothing Coming, Clarkson’s unexpected foray into the world of BookTok was – naturally – revealed as a ploy to promote his own latest publication, which will be undoubtedly be highly successful commercially, and is unlikely to trouble the judges of next year’s Baillie Gifford prize. 
Yet it was the first book that he singled out that raised the most eyebrows. Clarkson said, briskly, “There’s this, Michel Houellebecq’s Annihiliation… Now I liked Serotonin, and I liked Submission, but this one, not so much.” That Clarkson should not only have read the latest book by a decidedly literary French novelist, but be sufficiently au fait with his oeuvre to be able to make a snap comparison with two of his recent books, may have come as a surprise to some of his near-nine million followers on Instagram. 
For years, Clarkson has had a reputation as a little Englander par excellence, the living embodiment of a John Bull type of British man who is often roused to anger by the encroachments of foreigners on our country. If you want to see how dedicated he is to all things British, just take a look at the menu for his pub, The Farmer’s Dog. Apart from the inevitable presence of chicken liver paté, there is nothing that could be remotely described as anything other than solidly parochial, a nostalgic riot of sausages and mash, apple crumble and what the menu calls “a very British selection of drinks”. Even the wines come from Kent and Surrey. The Farmer’s Dog seems to be the epitome of Clarksonian values, a place where frites and champagne are outlawed, in favour of good old-fashioned chips and Lisa’s Le Pop Fizz, a sparkling English wine named after his girlfriend. 
A post shared by Jeremy Clarkson (@jeremyclarkson1)
It is hard to imagine Michel Houellebecq opening a pub, or indeed any kind of establishment that would be open to paying customers. Since he emerged into French literary consciousness with his breakthrough novel, 1998’s Atomised, he has relished a level of international fame that few other living writers can match, all while writing demanding and decidedly literary novels. These include 2001’s Platform, 2010’s award-winning The Map and the Territory as well as Clarkson’s favourite, Submission, which was published on January 7 2015. 
This was the same day as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, which had unwelcome parallels for Houellebecq, who has established a reputation in France as an outspoken critic of Islam, and was put on trial on charges of racial hatred in 2002. He was acquitted, despite or because he announced that “I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims, but I have as much contempt as ever for Islam.” 
Houellebecq could hardly be accused of inconsistency. “Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been from the moment it appeared,” he said while promoting Platform. “Fortunately, it is doomed. On one hand, because God does not exist, and even if someone is an idiot, he will eventually realize that. In the long run, the truth will triumph. On the other hand, Islam is undermined from the inside by capitalism. We can only hope that it will triumph rapidly.” 
France is a country that prizes free expression from its writers, and so Houellebecq has been able to offer his trenchant and uncensored views to a mixture of horror and approva. He most recently declared in an interview with the conservative magazine Front Populaire that assimilation was impossible. “There will be acts of resistance, reverse Bataclans attacks aimed at mosques as well as cafés popular with Muslims” he said. “The objective of the local French population is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them or another possibility, that they go away.” 
On paper, Houellebecq and Clarkson are an unlikely duo. The first is a self-described  “author of a nihilistic era and the suffering that goes along with nihilism”, whereas the latter is a self-consciously splenetic figure who, over the past few years, has directed public rants towards everyone and everything from Meghan Markle to electric cars. Houellebecq was recently tricked into appearing in a pornographic film, KIRAC 27, and the idea for his participation in the unlikely top-shelf exercise (or, as its makers call it, “an experimental erotic film”) was the splendidly Gallic shrug that it would “counteract his gloom”. 
It is hard to imagine Clarkson being lured into such an exercise, but his romantic life has long been a source of catnip to the tabloids. He has been married twice and has been with his partner Lisa Hogan since 2017. One of the running jokes of his television series Clarkson’s Farm is that he seems perpetually on the verge of proposing marriage to her, much to her apparent surprise and delight (“Ah, is it a proposal? Every time you say you’ve got a surprise I think ‘he’s going to propose’. Every time”). But such a moment has yet to occur, something that Clarkson seems all too aware would make for great – if somewhat – contrived television. (Houellebecq, perhaps inevitably, is now married to a woman half his age, Qianyun Lysis Li, an ardent admirer of his work, after two previous divorces.) 
Yet what makes the French intellectual and the English television presenter such interesting figures is that both have made a career out of defying expectations. Houellebecq may have been seized by the French far Right as the standard bearer for their concerns about immigration and race in the country, but he has refused to be pigeonholed as a hidebound conservative. Submission ends with the central character contemplating a conversion to Islam and Houellebecq, when asked about how he has voted in previous elections, doesn’t exactly conform to type. “There is a class which votes for Le Pen, a class which votes for Mélenchon, a class which votes for Macron, and a class which votes for Fillon,” he has said. “I am part of the France which votes for Macron, because I am too rich to vote for Le Pen or Mélenchon.” In other words, you have the unlikely image of Michel Houellebecq, papa au centre. 
Clarkson, meanwhile, surprised and bewildered many of his admirers when he refused to vote for Brexit, claiming that it was important for Britain to remain in the EU and thereby able to exert influence over the institution. Although there is a misguided popular belief that Clarkson was a committed, or at least converted Brexiteer, he has consistently extolled the virtues of Europe and the Europeans, although this has often come with a generous dollop of the tongue-in-cheek. “I should make it clear that I have an abiding respect for the French.” he once said. “I admire their almost total disregard for the feelings of others and I much enjoy my time in their country. I even like eating their buntings. But I will admit that they are a bit weird. And you can see this in the cars they make.” 
Yet one area that Clarkson and Houellebecq see eye to eye is in the way that French farmers have been marginalised and treated appallingly by successive governments. The novel Serotonin revolved around its (depressed, naturally) protagonist Florent-Claude Labrouste and his growing belief that country matters were compromised beyond repair. Houellebecq writes, bitterly, that “In short, what is taking place with French agriculture is a vast redundancy plan, but one that is secret and invisible, where people disappear one by one, on their plots of land, without ever being noticed.” 
Meanwhile, Clarkson, who has been a regular visitor to France since the age of 19, announced his solidarity with striking farmers earlier this year when he tweeted: “Agriculteurs français. Je parie que personne n’a jamais dit cela auparavant, mais bonne chance, venant d’Angleterre”. In English, the typically Clarksonian sentiment “French farmers, I bet nobody has said this before, but good luck, from England”. 
Both men – close in age, Clarkson’s 64 to Houellebecq’s 68 – can best be understood not as conservative reactionaries, but as patriotic romantics, people who look to their respective countries as places where change is possible, even desirable, but only when done in the right fashion and for the right reasons. Both are considerably more interesting and nuanced figures than the media bogeymen of legend, and their elevated places in public consciousness suggest that people not only want to hear from them, but value their contributions to national debate – even if, on occasion, it can feel as if the bull has entered the china shop. 
Still, can we expect a reciprocal Instagram post of Houellebecq leafing through Diddley Squat: Home to Roost? Such things might be a step too far, even for this particular entente cordiale. 
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