He has always brushed off suggestions of a career in politics but championed the cause of fellow farmers at protests this week

Steve Berry, a presenter on the BBC’s Top Gear for six years, can remember the moment he first rubbed up against Jeremy Clarkson’s ego and ambition. It was the mid-1990s and Berry had a new agent who suggested he should push to be the main presenter on the show.

“And I thought, ‘Yeah, OK, why not?” recalled Berry, 60. “I just was constantly bombarding them with ideas and I got taken on one side by one of the directors, and he said, ‘You know Jeremy sits there and times how much time he has on the programme’. I said, ‘You what?’ ‘He sits there with a stopwatch’. I have no idea if this is true but he says, ‘He’s worked out that in this season you have had this amount of screen time and if it were a title race you are only a few points off where he is’. So the guy says, ‘So watch yourself’. Next thing I know, I was dragged into [executive producer] Jon Bentley’s office. He said, ‘Sit down. You are never going to be the next Jeremy Clarkson, you know’. I was basically being getting warned off.”