Clarkson’s Farm star Jeremy Clarkson slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer live on stage at the Great British Farm Fest, which ran from Friday, 22 until Sunday, 24 May. As the festival drew to a close, the 66-year-old took to the stage with his Prime Video co-stars as they reflected on the event, which celebrated British farming.
As he spoke to the crowd about the struggles facing farmers, he reflected on the Bovine TB outbreak which hit Diddly Squat Farm in July 2025. “Those of you not involved in cow farming, you have no idea how devastating that is. I mean, we were absolutely heartbroken at the farm, having to send pregnant cows off for Keir Starmer to kill them for no reason…” he said. The animal affected was a cow called Pepper, who had also been the very first calf born on his Oxfordshire farm. She was pregnant with twins when she was euthanised because of the disease.
Bovine tuberculosis is a respiratory disease caused by a bacterium, and all infected animals have to be put down.
At the time he announced the outbreak with a post on X. “Bad news from Diddly Squat. We’ve gone down with TB. Everyone here is absolutely devastated.”
Just day later he further expanded on what it meant for the farm. “The disruption’s enormous, because you aren’t allowed to operate as a business,” he said.
“You have to isolate them for two months. So all the barns we needed to store the grain in, we now have to convert into a cow hospital. We’ve got another calf with pneumonia, so that needs to be housed.”
“And we can’t buy or sell a cow now because the farm officially, you know, has TB,” he wrote in his column for The Times.
He had spoken about Pepper’s death at the time in his newspaper column. He wrote: “Even though she was pregnant with twins, she had to be destroyed.
“And what happens to her after that? Burned? Dissolved in acid? Nope. She goes into the food chain like any other farm animal.”