I have loved Jeremy Clarkson for as long as I can remember. Long before Diddly Squat, before the Cotswolds tractor, before Kaleb rolling his eyes at yet another harebrained scheme, there was Top Gear. The cheap car challenges, the caravans on fire, the chemistry with Hammond and May that you simply cannot manufacture. Then came The Grand Tour, the same daft brilliance with a bigger budget and a tent that moved around the world. He has been part of my weekly telly routine for decades, and I am not even slightly embarrassed to say it.

So when the news broke this week, in the final two episodes of Season 5 of Clarkson’s Farm, it landed with me much harder than I expected.

How the News Came Out

If you have watched the finale, you will know it does not feel like the show we usually settle down to. Clarkson himself warned us. In a video shared with fans before the episodes dropped, he said the closing two were not the bucolic, cheerful programme we are used to, and that they were a difficult watch. He was right.

Sitting in his office talking through the harvest with Charlie Ireland and Kaleb Cooper, he leant back and said simply, “I’ve got cancer.” Kaleb’s face said everything that the rest of us were feeling. Clarkson revealed he had known since May 2025, after a medical, a biopsy and the kind of phone call no one wants. The cancer was prostate cancer, it was aggressive, but it had been caught early.

Later in the series he explained that part of his prostate had been removed, telling Kaleb that ten percent of it was dead, the ten percent where the cancer was. The season ended with him in a hospital bed, the same place it began after his heart procedure the previous autumn, admitting that some of the treatment had gone awry. His sign off was the line that stayed with me all evening. If the treatment worked, he would see us for Season 6, and if it did not, he would not.

The Bit That Matters Most: He Is in Remission

Here is the part I want to shout from the rooftops. He is going to be alright.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Clarkson confirmed that a PSA test two months ago showed no sign of cancer and that he is now officially in remission. He will need regular blood tests to keep an eye on things, which is exactly how it should be, but the man is in the clear. In a video on his Instagram over the weekend, he told everyone, in classic Clarkson fashion, that they would have noticed he is not dead.

The treatment was not smooth. He has been honest that he made a mistake by putting himself back on blood thinners for his heart condition without asking a doctor, which triggered a serious emergency in the middle of the night. He described the pain in the only way Jeremy Clarkson could, and I will spare you the full quote, but it was not pleasant. He has since spoken to others who have walked the same path, including David Cameron and the restaurant critic Giles Coren, and he has turned the whole experience into something useful. He says if just one person watches the show, decides to get checked, catches it early and goes on to live a normal life, then it is worth being what he calls an illness bore.

I could not love him more for that.

What He Does for Farmers

The thing about Clarkson’s Farm is that it started as a bit of a lark and quietly became one of the most important things on television. It has done more to show ordinary people the reality of farming than any government campaign ever has. The brutal margins. The weather that can wipe out a year’s work in an afternoon. The mountain of paperwork. The fact that a farmer can do everything right and still lose money on a field of crops.

He has used his platform to stand up for an industry that feeds us and gets very little thanks for it. He turned up to protest against the inheritance tax changes on farmland, he has put the planning battles and the council fights on screen for millions to see, and he has made farmers visible in a way they have not been for a very long time. You do not have to agree with every opinion the man has ever voiced to recognise what he has done here.

For me he has become a proper national treasure, and I do not say that lightly. Very few people manage to be that funny, that stubborn and that genuinely useful to a cause all at once. Both the Diddly Squat Farm Shop and his pub The Farmer’s Dog are on my doorstep in Oxfordshire (I live in Worcestershire), and I have been meaning to visit for ages. This has only made me more determined to get over there. A jar of bee juice from the shop and a pint of Hawkstone at the pub, while doing my bit to support British farming, sounds like a very good day out to me.

The Carbon Tax on Fertiliser That Makes No Sense

Which brings me to something that has been quietly bubbling away and deserves a lot more attention than it is getting.

From 1 January 2027 the government is introducing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, known as CBAM, which will place a carbon tax on imported fertiliser along with goods like steel, aluminium and cement. The intention behind it, tackling carbon leakage, is reasonable enough on paper. The execution is where it falls apart for farmers.

The UK produces almost no ammonium nitrate at any real scale, so we rely heavily on imported fertiliser to keep input costs down. Tax those imports and you raise the cost across the whole sector. Estimates of the impact vary, with some industry figures warning of fifty pounds or more per tonne, and as much as a hundred and fifty pounds added to a tonne of urea, while other modelling suggests the early cost may land lower. Either way it is a cost going on at exactly the wrong moment, when farmers are already squeezed by fuel, feed and global instability.

The part that really gets me is the unfairness of it. The EU is phasing its version in gradually, starting at a fraction in 2027 and building up over years. The UK plan hits in full from day one, which could leave British farmers at a serious disadvantage compared to their European neighbours in those first couple of years. Fertiliser already makes up around thirty eight percent of crop specific costs and twelve percent of total farm costs for the arable sector, so this is not a rounding error. And because the tax falls on the input rather than on imported food, cheaper food grown abroad with untaxed fertiliser could undercut our own farmers on our own shelves.

We depend on farmers to grow our food. Making it harder and more expensive for them to do that, while leaving the door open to imports produced to lower standards, is the kind of policy that looks clever in a Treasury spreadsheet and falls apart the moment it meets a real field. It needs a rethink, and the louder we say so, the better.

Now the Bit I Really Need You to Read

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. One in eight men will get it in their lifetime, and the risk is higher if you are over 50, if you have a father or brother who has had it, or if you are Black, where the figure rises to one in four. The cruel thing about it, and the reason Clarkson’s story matters so much, is that most early prostate cancer has no symptoms at all. There is no routine screening programme, so it is genuinely down to men knowing their risk and asking the right questions.

Prostate Cancer UK has a free, anonymous online risk checker that takes about thirty seconds. You answer a few simple questions about your age, your ethnicity and your family history, and it tells you your level of risk and what to do next. Millions of men have already used it. You can find it at prostatecanceruk.org/risk-checker.

If you are a man reading this, please do it today. Not next week, not when you get a minute, today. And if you are a woman reading this, you almost certainly have men in your life you love. A husband, a dad, a brother, a friend. Send them the link. Nag them gently. Be the reason they get checked.

Clarkson caught his early and he is here to plant another harvest because of it. That is the whole point. Caught early, this is very treatable. Caught late, it is a different story entirely.

I am so glad he is going to be alright. I cannot wait for Season 6. And I will be raising a glass of prosecco to the men who read this and pick up the phone.

I cannot say this loudly enough – please pet checked. It really might save your life.