“My life has been turned upside down”: Dean Temple pictured outside Diddly Squat Farm Store Photo: Jeff Gilbert
Dean Temple never wanted to become Jeremy Clarkson's local councilor. A committed Conservative in the Cotswolds, he stood for the Chadlington and Churchill constituency of West Oxfordshire District Council, which includes Clarkson's Diddley Squat farm, as a “paper candidate” only in 2021 because the party needed to fill a vacancy.
Temple, from nearby Witney, didn't expect to win – especially since he doesn't drive and getting around the countryside would be difficult. Having lost the race for a seat on Oxfordshire County Council that same day, he headed home but was stopped by a local official who told him he had won a hopeless election. “They told me it was a nice, quiet place where nothing ever happens,” the 46-year-old recalls.
That couldn't be further from the truth. A month after Temple's surprise victory, Clarkson Farm premiered in June 2021. The Amazon Prime series became a smash hit as Clarkson brought his unique blend of masculinity, courage and reckless abandon to the world of farming. “Boom,” Temple says matter-of-factly. “My life has turned upside down.”
Every good story needs a villain, and in the case of Clarkson's Farm, that villain was West Oxfordshire District Council and its elected officials. By refusing Clarkson permission to build a car park for his farm shop or to open a restaurant to sell his produce, councilors and planners were condemned as halos forcing Diddly Squat into bankruptcy. Millions of Clarkson's devoted fans quickly mobilized.
“I sat and watched it as a fan, laughing and thinking: 'This is brilliant, this is fantastic, this…'. Ahhh, sugar,” Temple says of the moment he realized how the Council had been portrayed in the first episode. “Suddenly I was getting calls and death threats from all over the world because apparently I am a nasty person.”
Temple, as a member of the local farm board with public contact details, found himself under siege. “I had to close my Facebook Messenger account because after about four days it became unusable. First I tried to answer and gave reasons why we… – he trails off. “You realize you're dealing with people who have opinions, have watched the show and are therefore experts on what happened, and I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm talking about. “.
Things got so bad for Temple, an accountant for a local software developer who had long suffered from depression, that he had to take time off from both his day job and his council job and move out of his home. “I went to stay with a friend for a couple of days: no TV, no papers, nothing at all. They call it a digital detox, just to figure out what's important and what's not,” he recalls at a café near Clarkson's farm. “I thought, 'Leave?' a neglected part of British life, launches, Temple is fed up. As he prepares to stand for re-election this week, he has decided to leave his current ward and is standing as the Conservative candidate in Witney. Was the farm and its shenanigans the cause? “100 percent,” he says.
“When it first happened, I had to stop and learn to deal with it. But why do you need to go through this again? I mean, season three is coming out, who knows what's going to happen,” Temple adds. “Do I have to deal with weeks and weeks and weeks of abusive phone calls and everything else? Will I be able to handle this? Maybe. If I want to? No. If I have the choice to say, “No more,” that’s okay. Why did you have to go through this?”
Temple said he received abusive phone calls for weeks after the Clarkson Farm broadcast. calls. Photo: Jeff Gilbert
Local authorities and their councilors can be advised to watch the new series while sitting on the sofa. Minutes into the first episode, Clarkson, 64, complains to the council. “After the restaurant closed, we could no longer afford to keep all the cows. We could keep the calves to fatten them up, but their mothers…” hinting at his signature pause, “.. will have to go.” Clarkson later says that “thanks to West Oxfordshire District Council we now have to use chemicals” when he buys artificial fertilizer rather than implement a plan to use cow manure on his fields.
Clarkson's attacks on the council continue unabated. When he decides to revive part of the farm and clear the hedges to make blackberry jam, he says: “I wonder if I can make money from the part of the farm that I don't farm. The Council couldn't stop it, could they? I mean, they could try, but they couldn't.” In episode two, he discusses how to appeal planning board decisions. “Fight the bastards,” he says quietly. “Pound them into the ground like tent pegs.”
The former Top Gear presenter bought his 1,000-acre farm in 2008, becoming a leading member of the so-called Chipping Norton group. and started running it himself in 2019. Soon after, he hit upon the idea of turning his new earnings into his next series.
Much of the drama arises from Clarkson's disputes with the council, which in turn stem from the fact that part of the farm is in the area Cotswolds Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), where there are strict restrictions on what you can do.
Clarkson and his farm manager Caleb Cooper Photo: Amazon Prime VideoIt all started when Clarkson opened his farm store and advertised it to millions subscribers on social networks. The farm was overrun with visitors, causing chaos on rural roads that were not designed to accommodate such a large number of vehicles. Clarkson's plans to build a car park were thwarted by the council.
Then a plan was hatched to turn his lambing barn, with stunning views of the Cotswolds, into a restaurant. When the offer was rejected, Clarkson converted another shed on his estate into a 60-seat eatery – believing it did not require planning permission – but he was not allowed to build a road for cars to drive there, and the restaurant was eventually abandoned closed by decision of the municipal council. order. Most recently, he was denied permission to plant trees around a temporary parking lot near the store.
Temple is skeptical of some of Clarkson's motives. “If his only goal was to build a restaurant, he could do it, but he would have to adjust to some things,” he says. “The problem is that I think with my cynical head: to what extent is he building a restaurant because he needs a restaurant, and to what extent is he building a restaurant because he is sitting in an office with his production. teams and saying, “So season two, what should we do?” What's a good TV?
Take for example the lambing barn that was built in the first episode and converted into a restaurant after he gave up raising sheep. It is located inside the AONB. “If he had put this building on the other side of the road, it would have been a completely different set of rules, which means he would have presented it to the council, and the council would have gone,” Temple mimes, stamping the document on the table, “passed.” . . That would be crap TV, wouldn't it? He fights in battles, he has articles published on his “something,” he has a TV show, he can discuss it with politicians.”
As a result, Temple said, Clarkson's fans got it wrong when it came to the advice. “TV shows are entertainment, and people don’t understand that it’s not a documentary. There [just] has to be some truth to it,” he says. “What do they call 'Made in Chelsea'? Scenario reality. It promotes a certain plot and idea, and is framed and edited in a certain way.”
The Amazon series has been a huge success, but the village is having a hard time keeping up with the level of interest from Clarkson's fans. Every spring and summer, thousands of people flock to the farm shop, parking their cars on either side of the only road between Chadlington and Chipping Norton, where there is a school and a GP surgery.
“Road blocked for weeks”: Cars parked on the side of the road outside Diddly Squat Farm Shop. Photo: Gareth Fuller
“Every season that it's open, that road is blocked for a few weeks,” Temple says. “You can’t call ambulances there. Fire trucks cannot be parked there. And it's just a complete mess. It’s not designed for that kind of traffic.” He adds that if he had one right, it would be that the farm store would not open in the summer until schools closed for the holidays to reduce traffic.
Clarkson's decision to build a parking lot had its problems. “If you build a car park and reduce traffic on the roads, that would be fantastic. But that means laying 14 acres of tarmac across the Cotswolds. You go up there and look, you see beautiful greenery, beautiful greenery, beautiful greenery, dog parking, beautiful greenery,” he says. “This is an imbalance in planning. Yes, this is the answer, but there is nothing worse than solving a problem by inventing another problem.”
Temple is unusual for a local man because he decided to stick his head above the parapet and talk about what it's like to live in the shadow of the world's most famous farm. Someone who lives nearby says he's “had a lot of trouble in the past” and doesn't want to talk because “it would only add fuel to [Clarkson's] fire that he likes to stoke.” Another says that “the main challenge is to get the council to sort out the boundaries, besides getting local people to accept the situation as it stands.”
Temple was supported by his two children – Josh, 22, and Millie, 18, and his fiancée Sheila, whom he met at the Tory party conference a few years ago. “She calls the phone as soon as he goes down and asks, ‘Do you need to talk?’” Temple says. “She's telling all her friends that my fiancé told Clarkson to go to hell himself.”
The scandalous restaurant opened by Clarkson on his farm. Photo: Adrian Sherratt
Are Temple and Clarkson lying down? “We used to chat a lot about Formula 1,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve said a word to each other for the last year.”
Despite everything, Temple is positive about Clarkson and what he is trying to do with his farm. “He has a lot more interaction than many of the other, more famous residents. Kate Moss is just around the corner, David Beckham, and we'll never see them, whereas he'll really be interacting with the community,” he says.
“You only have to look at his relationship with Caleb [Cooper, Clarkson's pal] and the restaurant's suppliers. He cares about them. He goes out of his way to help people and support the local community,” adds Temple. “I will give it to him in abundance. He really tries very hard to help. He is not like other settlers who come, set boundaries and say: “This is my land, get away from the peasants.” He really gets involved.”
Whatever happens in the local elections on May 2, Temple hopes he will spend less time focusing on what's going on in Diddly Squat. “If I could go back into obscurity,” he sighs, “that would be great.”
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