Jeremy Clarkson claimed he’d been told by a police call handler she’d be forced to ‘open a new line of inquiry into racist behaviour’ if he kept talking 'in this vein' – after he called 999 to report a pair of ‘travellers’ who had turned up at his Cotswold farm.

Writing in the Sunday Times, the Chadlington farm owner and former Top Gear host said a ‘couple of chaps’ had come up the drive asking for a selfie. There was ‘something about them’ he ‘didn’t like the look of’ and he told them to leave. A drone had been sighted over the farm earlier that day, he said.

He eventually called 999 after initially calling Thames Valley Police’s non-emergency number 101.

Mr Clarkson, 61, whose hit series Clarkson’s Farm charts his agricultural efforts on his west Oxfordshire estate, said of the call handler: “She seemed to think I was reporting someone for wanting a selfie. But she did at least ask me to describe them, so I said they were Travellers.

“There was then a pause, after which she said that if I continued in this vein, she’d be forced to open a new line of inquiry into racist behaviour.

“That was scary, and tricky too, because how do you describe someone without bringing colour and religion and race into it? I explained to Magnum PI that they’d actually introduced themselves as Travellers, but she couldn’t get her head round this either, so the call ended and I waited for the actual police to not show up.

“Naturally they obliged, which is why I went to bed with a big ebony stick that’s used throughout Africa for killing lions.”

The motoring journalist also hit out at a letter to West Oxfordshire District Council from a Thames Valley Police ‘crime prevention design adviser’ commenting on plans to create a café and restaurant at his Diddly Squat farm shop.

The police staff member asked for Mr Clarkson to set out how traffic would be managed during events or filming to avoid a repeat of the ‘highway disruption and subsequent safety issues seen previously’. The success of Amazon series Clarkson’s Farm resulted in heavy traffic on neighbouring roads as people flocked to the shop.

Mr Clarkson, who claimed that Amazon had sent out a security guard to alleviate his concerns about potential thieves, called for the creation of a ‘private police force’.

“Motto: ‘We catch crims and lock them up and we don’t care about bicycle parking or diversity in the community’,” he wrote.

Thames Valley Police declined to comment.