A long road Jeremy Clarkson: motoring writer, TV presenter, firebrand farmer - then politician?

Steve Berry, a presenter on the BBC's Top Gear TV show for six years, can remember the moment he first rubbed up against Jeremy Clarkson's ego and ambition.

- Daniel Boffey

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 stop watch. 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] John Bentley's office. He said, 'Sit down. You are never going to be the next Jeremy Clarkson, you know.' I was basically being warned off."

Relations barely improved when Berry gave an interview to the now defunct News of the World in which he jokingly suggested it would suit him if Clarkson would "fall into a hole in the ground so I can have his job". The paper splashed it.

"So that morning, his ex-wife Francie - who was the power behind the throne, the one who made him what he is today - rang me up and lambasted me, 'What is this in the News of the World? How can you possibly say this?' I said, 'I did say it but they have moved the words around to make it look really bad.' She was going on and I said, 'Francie, can I stop you? Where I come from if two men fall out they go out in the street and sort it out.