Jeremy Clarkson vows to 'stay home' this summer after airport horror

Jeremy Clarkson said he plans to 'stay home' this summer instead of jetting off abroad - and he's encouraged others to do the same. The Clarkson’s Farm star's recent airport experience appears to have put him off.

The 64-year-old took a trip to Madrid with girlfriend Lisa Hogan last weekend in a bid to get some sun. But he said said what used to be "easy" was now not due to "government bureaucracy, Border Force paranoia and a general sense at airports that passengers are a damn nuisance".

In his latest column for The Sun, he wrote: “So you check in and stand in a queue full of old ladies and toddlers who don’t realise that they can’t travel with liquids, that they need to take laptops out of their hand luggage and that they can’t go through the X-ray machine with six frying pans and an ingot in their backpack.

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“Then you walk through a shopping centre that sells perfume, and suitcases, for those who’ve arrived at the airport with all their holiday clothes in a carrier bag. And then you’re in a lift. And then you’re in a train and then you’re in another lift, and then they say your flight is boarding. So you form another queue which doesn’t move because your flight actually isn’t boarding.”

He went on to say the plane in Madrid had stopped "at the very end of the furthest terminal from baggage reclaim", resulting in a long walk that made "every old injury start to flare up". Having finally joined a queue for an electronic passport reader, which "no one can ever work", he said he reached the front to find they were only for people who live in the EU.

"So you go for another walk into another hall where you are presented with a snaking queue full of people who don’t speak Spanish. Or English, and have no paperwork," he said. "After three hours, your back is really starting to hurt and you are scanning the queue for people who look like they might have voted for Brexit, because you want to peel them."

Trying to put people off going through the experience themselves, he concluded: "So don’t have a coronary. Don’t spend half your holiday in a lift or a queue. Stay home. It’s going to be a beautiful summer here. I can feel it."