Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Then you have the electric-window switches, which look great but are in the wrong place. As is the volume control for the stereo. It’s as though one hundred people – all children – have contributed an idea, and they’ve all been accepted.

Oh, and then we get to the price. The Cooper S version I tested is £20,905. This makes it nearly £500 more expensive than the more practical, less idiotic-looking four-seat convertible. And about £5,000 more than a Mini should be.

Subliminally, other road users know this, too, which is why I spent most of my week in a blizzard of hand gestures and cruelty. I felt like the jack in a game of boules. I felt like Richard Hammond. And the biggest problem with all of this is that the car itself is absolutely fantastic. A genuine gem. A nugget of precious metal in a sea of plastic and Korean facsimiles. I absolutely loved it.

By far the best bit is the engine. It’s a turbocharged 1.6-litre that produces 181 bhp. That doesn’t sound the most exciting recipe in the world, but after a whisper of lag you barely notice, the torque is immense. It feels as if there’s a muscle under the bonnet and you never tire of flexing it.

The only real problem is that on a motorway – and I’ve noticed this in all Minis – its natural cruising speed is about 110 mph. Because of a combination of where you sit, the angle of the throttle pedal, the gearing and the vibrations, this is how fast you go when you’re not concentrating. You need to watch it.

Or get off the motorway. That’s a good idea, actually, because although there’s a bit of typical big-power-meets-front-wheel-drive torque steer, the chassis is mostly brilliant. It’s like an old-fashioned hot hatch: a Volkswagen Golf GTI or Peugeot 205 GTI – the sort of car you can fling into a bend at any speed that takes your fancy.

You would expect the ride to be as awful as the handling is good, especially with all the strengthening needed to make up for the lack of a roof. But no. It’s firm, for sure, but it never crashes or shudders in even the worst pothole. It’s never uncomfortable. It’s a joy. And it’s not unduly thirsty, either.

At this point I’d love to tell you all is just as well when you put the roof down. But I can’t, I’m afraid. Because in the seven days I spent with this car it never stopped raining even for a moment.

I can tell you, though, the roof is only semi-electric and some of the operation has to be done by hand. That’s no biggie. I can also tell you that the boot is much bigger than you might be expecting. But the last thing I have to say is the most surprising of all: this car is worth a serious look.

It’s not as well balanced as a Mazda MX-5, but it’s faster and it has more soul. In many ways it reminds me of Richard Hammond. It’s small and it’s annoying and it wears stupid clothes. But when you get to know it, it’s a bloody good laugh.

The Volkswagen Golf. The Vauxhall Astra. That medium-sized Toyota that is not called the Corolla any more. What is it called? It’s a name that’s sadly not on the tip of my tongue. My mind is blank. The Areola? Or is that the ring around your nipple? Whatever, the reason that I rarely test such cars on these pages, or on the television, is simple: what’s to say?

For some time car makers have been treading water in a stagnant pool. If they wanted to launch a new car, it was easy. They called a company that made shock absorbers, a company that made pistons and a company that made satnavs. Then got some Poles or Slovaks to Sellotape them together – et voilà .

In the mainstream there was no fizz, no drama, no inventiveness and no risk. It got to the point where Ford’s engineers made a big noise about the Focus having expensive-to-make independent rear suspension. Yes, this made it lovely to drive at the sort of speed it would never travel but, really, the main reason they were so proud is that they had won a minor internal battle with the bean counters, who doubtless would have wanted them to use a cheaper fixed-axle setup like everyone else. Car making. It had become accountancy.

But a man called Swampy had taken up residence in a tunnel just outside Newbury in Berkshire and started talking about something called ‘the environment’. Now there had been lots of anti-state, anti-system Swampies in the past, shouting about workers’ rights and peace and communism, but none had gained any traction with the middle classes. So they had remained a noisy but minority interest, like bell-ringing.

Swampy, though, had hit upon an idea that did strike a chord with the nation’s jam makers. They liked gardening. They liked peace and quiet. They liked the idea of this young man in his dirty trousers trying to stop the government building a bypass. So suddenly he was joined in his campaign by lots of ladies in camel-hair coats.

It wasn’t just in Newbury, either. Environmentalism was taking off all around the world. Leninism had a new face. It was the face of a drowning polar bear. And everyone seemed to like it.

To show they were in tune with the times, politicians started to make green noises, too. Mr Cameron went on a plane to the Arctic to look at a dog and then put a small wind turbine on his house. In America a former presidential candidate called Al Gore made a film called Workers’ Control of Factories . And global warming became the new terror.

Naturally the motorcar was quickly identified as the main problem. Not only did it allow workers personal freedom but also it produced vast quantities of carbon dioxide from its tailpipe… as a direct result of environmentalists insisting in the Eighties that it had to be fitted with a catalytic converter. A device that converts gases that don’t warm the planet into CO2. Which does, apparently.

So every year governments imposed tougher and tougher legislation that forced car makers to wake up. They were being forced by law to make their products chew less fuel. This meant they had to get inventive. And while I don’t like the reasoning behind that, I do like the results. Mainstream cars are getting interesting again.

We now have hybrids, and I love the way they obey the letter of the law but completely ignore its spirit. Because how can a car with two power plants possibly be good for the planet? It can’t. These cars – they’re tools for fools.

More recently we have been seeing some clever variations on the hybrid theme. From Vauxhall there’s the Ampera, and from a small firm in America there’s the Fisker Karma, which works like a diesel-electric locomotive. Elsewhere people are working on hydrogen fuel cells, and there are pure electric cars, too, such as the Nissan Leaf. But the less we say about those, the better. Because let’s be clear. They are interesting to write about, but… They. Do. Not. Work.

They are expensive to buy, their ecological benefits are debatable – they run on power that comes from Drax B – and if you want the costly battery pack to last, it takes several hours to charge it up. This means it would take several days to drive from London to Edinburgh.

All of which brings me to the Ford Focus. It’s called the EcoBoost and it meets the new green legislation in the cleverest, simplest, bestest way yet. It runs on an engine so small, the cylinder block would sit neatly on a piece of A4 paper. That small.

And before you think that a 999 cc three-cylinder engine could not possibly produce enough power to move a car as large as a Focus, look at the figures. It produces 123 bph – exactly what was delivered by Ford’s old 1.6 Focus. But amazingly you get more torque and, of course, greatly reduced fuel consumption.