Jeremy Clarkson's 2021 comments on inheritance tax resurface during fiery BBC exchange

Jeremy Clarkson has been quizzed on comments he made on inheritance tax back in 2021 in a fiery exchange with BBC reporter Victoria Derbyshire.

Clarkson joined more than 10,000 farmers in London on Tuesday, November 19 protesting against changes to agricultural inheritance tax.

The star of Clarkson’s Farm and former Top Gear presenter was asked about previous comments from a 2021 interview with The Times during his appearance supporting protestors.

During that 2021 interview Clarkson said that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in his decision to buy land.

“The only reason I said that is because I actually bought the farm because I wanted to shoot, but you can't go around saying ‘Oh, I wanted to shoot’ because then you get shouted at by animal enthusiasts," Clarkson said in a video filmed on Tuesday.

“I jokingly said, oh, it's just inheritance tax and now of course it's come back to bite me on the arse, but it doesn't really matter because we're here to support farmers, we’re not talking about me.”

Clarkson was also involved in a heated exchange with Derbyshire for BBC Newsnight.

After Clarkson said he was there to support farmers, Derbyshire said: “So it's not about you, your farm and to avoid inheritance attack?”

“Classic BBC there,” Clarkson said, before Derbyshire referred back to the comments from the 2021 interview.

Later during the exchange, Clarkson spoke about his decision to buy a farm by saying: “Let's start from the beginning. I wanted to shoot, which comes with the benefit of not paying inheritance tax, now I do.

BBC

“People like me will simply put it in a trust, and so long as I live for seven years that's fine. As my daughter says, you might be in a deep freeze at the end of it, but you will live for seven years.

“It is incredibly time consuming to have to do that, why should all these people have to do that, why should they?”

Clarkson previously accused the Labour government of planning to "ethnically cleanse farmers from the countryside" following the Autumn budget announcements.

The 64-year-old owner of Diddly Squat Farm, which features in the hit Prime show Clarkson's Farm, labelled Labour's plans to raise inheritance tax for land owners an "all-out war on the countryside" and said the new rules will "make farming nigh on impossible".

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