There was no steak and chips on the menu at the Assaggi restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, on Thursday but Jeremy Clarkson managed to avoid losing his temper.

Twenty-four hours had elapsed since the BBC sacked him from Top Gear for punching a producer (allegedly over an absent steak and chips). Improbably, despite much more weighty national and international news, Clarkson was at the top of the headlines; the paparazzi were hunting him and the man himself was eating pasta.

With him at the first-floor summit in the restaurant were his co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond and the man often referred to as the fourth member of the Top Gear team, Andy Wilman, Clarkson’s old Repton school friend and executive producer of the