Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Let’s start with the ignition key. You know those cheap electronic toys that you buy children from the gift shop on a cross-Channel ferry? Well, this has the quality of the wrapping in which they are sold. And naturally it didn’t work.

I learnt this outside the police station in Ladbroke Grove in west London. The traffic lights went green and I set off. But I didn’t because the car stalled and it would not restart. So I pushed it to the side of the road where, after several attempts, the diesel engine finally clattered into life.

At the next set of lights exactly the same thing happened again. And so at the third set I made sure it didn’t stall by summoning 3,000 revs and setting off nice and gently. This made the whole of Notting Hill smell of frazzled clutch.

There are some other interesting faults as well. This is not a small car. It’s a little larger than a Ford Focus and a little smaller than a Mondeo. But inside it has the headroom of a coffin. Speaking of which, it didn’t do especially well in its Euro NCAP safety tests. The airbag didn’t inflate sufficiently well to stop the dummy driver’s head hitting the steering wheel, and while the feet and neck were well looked after, protection for the thighs and genitals was only ‘marginal’. I make no observation about that. Yet. Of course, as it’s a Chinese car that’s assembled in Longbridge, you would not expect much in the way of quality. And it doesn’t disappoint…

It’s a widely held belief that mass-produced plastic was developed around the turn of last century. Well, the dashboard on the MG6 appears to be fabricated from a plastic that pre-dates that. I think it may follow a recipe laid down in the Middle Ages, when villagers would use cattle horns to make rudimentary windows.

Naturally there are many sharp edges. There’s one in particular on the steering wheel that could probably give you an elegant paper cut on that sensitive bit of webbing between your index finger and thumb.

Then there’s the kung-fu cupholder. It’s not damped, as it would be in a normal European car, so when you push the button your drink leaps out onto your passenger’s leg like Cato from the Pink Panther films. And it is a struggle to get any can I’ve ever seen to fit in it.

I shall talk now about the steering. It’s electric. But only literally. It feels as though the steering wheel is connected to an egg whisk of some kind. Spin it fast enough and the blades turn, causing a vat of creamy milk to start thickening. After this happens it begins to revolve v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and that action produces a centrifugal force that turns the front wheels. It’s a neat idea but I’m not sure it works very well.

As a boy, I used to look at my dad driving and wonder how he knew how much to turn the wheel when going round a corner. Alarmingly, in the MG6 you don’t.

Last weekend in Scotland I encountered many members of the MG Owners’ Club, driving from breakdown to breakdown with dirty fingernails and big grins on their faces. They had their roofs down, despite the cold, and it all looked very hearty and rorty and James May-ish.

The MG6 offers an experience that is nothing like that. It may say MG on the rump but it is as far removed from its predecessors as you are from an amoeba. It’s a carrier bag with a Coco Chanel badge. And I think that’s rotten.

The whole car’s rotten, really, and here’s the clincher. It’s not that cheap. The Magnette model I drove is £21,195. And for that you can have a normal car that doesn’t lacerate your fingers, stall, refuse to start, bash your head in every time you go over a bump and ruin your gentleman sausage if you have a crash.

In the whole of April the new MG operation sold thirteen cars throughout the whole of the UK. I’m surprised it was that many.

Monaco bills itself as a glittering jewel in the south of France. But in reality it’s a mostly overcast collection of people who choose to live far from their friends and family, in a 1960s council tower block, under the control of an extremely weird royal family, among a squadron of arms dealers and prostitutes.

And all so they can save a pound in tax. This makes it the world’s largest open prison for lunatics. And then, once a year, the grand prix circus rolls into town – and it all gets worse.

I stayed on a giant boat on what’s called the T-jetty. That’s pole position for the gin palaces, and you probably think that this would be heaven. Hot and cold running waitresses dropping tasty morsels into your mouth whenever you are breathing in the right direction. And some Formula One whizz-kid and his almost completely naked girlfriend waiting next door for you to nip round and chew the fat. That’s the message you get from the television pictures.

The reality is somewhat different. You hear of a party on a neighbouring boat, so you think you’ll pop by for a drink. Alas, every single person in Monaco has heard of the party also and has a similar plan. So, to prevent them all from getting on board, the boat’s captain has hired a French security team that stands about with curly-wurly earpieces making sure nobody gets on board at all.

You watch the men pleading and explaining that they are personal friends with the boat’s owner, but this is no good because he’s not at his own party. That’s the key to being a proper billionaire. Throw a party and then have dinner somewhere else.

Then you have the women, who are selected for admission purely, it seemed, on the basis of how naked they are. Amazingly the party does somehow happen, although everyone on board spends their entire evening making sure that they are talking to the most important person in the room. An example. I thought I’d introduce myself to Martin Whitmarsh, McLaren’s boss. But he was chatting to an Indian chap who was more important than me, so I was ignored. In fact, I was ignored so spectacularly by everyone that I ended up talking to the cabin boy for most of the night.

The next day you wake with a sore head. And to make everything more terrible, someone has pushed a microphone into a beehive and is blasting the resulting sound through the Grateful Dead’s speaker system across the whole principality. So you stagger about looking for Nurofen, eventually sourcing something appropriate from someone who’d crashed on a sofa. She was a nice girl. Apart from her Adam’s apple.

You then think it would be nice to go over to the paddock. But between your boat and the vast F1 motor homes is a 15-yard strip of water. And to cross it in a knackered dinghy with a Kenwood mixer on the back costs €20. That works out at more than £1 a yard. I think it would have been cheaper to use a private jet.

And it’s pointless anyway, because to collect the passes that have been supplied by Bernie Ecclestone, you need to go through a security barrier for which you need your pass. ‘ Non ,’ said the security guard.

This is one of the most important things about ‘doing’ Monaco for the grand prix. Yes, you need to spend all day smoking cigars the size of telegraph poles and wearing red trousers. That’s important, of course. But mostly you must be festooned with so many passes that you are in danger of slipping a disc. A lot of passes shows a lot of connections. None means you are paying another €20 to go back to your boat.

Then the race starts. And even though the boat on which I was staying was about the height of Nelson’s Column, and even though I climbed right up to the radar mast, all I could see was the top of the cars’ air intakes, momentarily, as they sped past the swimming pool.

So I went into the cabin to watch it on TV, which was fine except I couldn’t hear what Martin Brundle was saying because of the din outside. It’s strange. Most sports are perfectly watchable without someone explaining what’s going on. But with motor racing you really do need Mr Brundle to tell you why no one is attempting to overtake the car in front. Or else it just looks like twenty-two thin young men driving around a town.