Why Jeremy Clarkson’s pub, The Farmer’s Dog, is thriving

The tale of the death of the British pub has been well told. Around eight boozers a week are serving last orders for the final time. But some pubs are bucking the trend, the most famous of which is The Farmer’s Dog in Oxfordshire, Jeremy Clarkson’s latest success story. What is its secret?

It’s not hard to see the appeal of this pub, a welcoming brick building with a spacious terrace overlooking the rolling Cotswold hills. When I visited a few weeks ago, the pub felt alive, bustling without descending into chaos. It’s a far cry from the boarded-up boozers I’ve lamented in these pages. It is also tellingly diverse, with Eastern European accents mingling with posh drawls; overheard banter, like a Polish builder ribbing a toff about his apparently dreadful parking. It reminded me how these spots knit strangers into something like kin.

The Farmer’s Dog dishes up good, honest fare. The food doesn’t pretend to be gourmet but it delivers where it matters: offering flavour, freshness, and that profound sense of place. Yet beneath the idyll lurks trouble. Last month, Clarkson revealed his pub was ‘swindled’ out of £27,000 after a computer hack – a gut-punch for any landlord, let alone one juggling farm and fame. And that’s before the other scam: a chancer claiming allergy foul play, angling for a £50,000 payout. Clarkson is considering banning ‘faddy eaters’ altogether as a result. He’s right to rage. As a pub manager myself, wrestling with rising costs and red tape in my Oxfordshire spots, I feel his pain, anger and frustration.

Running a pub, Clarkson says, is harder than farming – harder, indeed, than anything. Vomit in the loos, brawls over nothing, the endless dance of allergies that feel more like fraud than fact. Add the new workers’ rights laws, sky-high taxes, and councils breathing down your neck, and it’s no wonder one pub shutters daily across Britain.

But what makes Clarkson’s venture so compelling – and praiseworthy – is his brilliant knack for playing the straight man, the hapless rube stumbling through the absurdities of rural life, when in truth he’s anything but.

Through his farm show, Clarkson’s Farm, and pub escapades, he spotlights the extraordinary difficulties and vital importance of farming and pubs, drawing the public along on what’s really an extremely complicated journey. He turns the drudgery – the hackers, the hypochondriacs, the bureaucratic knots – into must-watch drama, all while championing British produce and local bounty. It’s a masterstroke: by feigning bewilderment at the red tape and scams, he makes us all see the madness, and perhaps even laugh at it, like when he jokes about banning nuts altogether to sidestep the allergy brigade. If only every publican had his wit to turn hardship into headlines.

Yet there’s the rub: Clarkson’s celebrity warps the tale, insulating him from the bone-deep despair that flattens lesser landlords – those without Amazon deals or viral rants to rally the troops, facing quiet closures with over 500 licensed premises shuttered in the past year alone.

Clarkson’s visibility amplifies the fight, sure, but it also glosses over those darker tragedies; the families ruined without a halo – or a helicopter – to swoop in and save the day. Even so, for dragging the pub’s plight into the light, we owe him a nod: he’s the motormouth we didn’t know we needed, turning our collective groan into a guilty chuckle.

Clarkson’s pub, now a year old, embodies the paradox. It’s a celebrity beacon, drawing crowds from afar: destination drinkers who boost the till but strain the seams.

Live bands on Fridays, choirs crooning Hawkstone jingles, pizzas from his wheat: it’s rural idyll, as he puts it, bathed in that warm glow of farm-fresh enterprise. But for the average publican? There are no Amazon cameras or fan legions to cushion the blows.

My own taps have seen similar woes: the post-pandemic slump, energy bills that bite like winter frost, and punters tighter with their pounds. Clarkson’s fame gives him a leg up – synergies with the farm shop, a brand that sells itself – but even he’s venting about the ‘chaotic’ back-end, the scams and swindles that erode the joy.

Pubs are the lifeblood of villages, often the last bastion when the shop, the butcher, and even the church have vanished. They’re the hearth where community endures, the place for a yarn over a pint amid the quiet erosion of rural life – and, as the diverse throng at Clarkson’s garden tables attests, a natural forge for integration in our multi-ethnic nation.

Think of the 1950s Irish, like my forebears, who wove into broader British society through sweat on building sites and roads, sealed with camaraderie in the local boozer. How are we to build a successful, cohesive state without such spaces?

Clarkson, with his no-nonsense swagger, reminds us of that too. His pub is a melting pot of sorts, where wellies meet well-heeled fans – and accents from Warsaw to Witney – leaving everyone a little less divided. Sitting at The Farmer’s Dog with my wife Lorraine, pint in hand as the sun dipped, I felt a flicker of hope. The Farmer’s Dog isn’t just surviving; it’s thriving on that Clarkson cheek: banning complainers, sourcing local, turning hardship into headlines. Other pub landlords might not share Clarkson’s fame, but they have much to learn from this celebrity publican. If a motormouth like Clarkson can weather the storm, perhaps there’s life yet in the great British pub. It won’t be easy – hackers, hypochondriacs, and HMRC see to that – but amid Oxfordshire’s timeless beauty, it’s worth raising a glass.

Here’s to the landlords who endure, and the punters who keep them pouring. And to Clarkson: keep playing the fool, old chap – you’re wiser than most.