Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has broken the habit of a lifetime and said something nice about a foreign country - namely New Zealand.

Clarkson, who has referred to Mexicans as "lazy, feckless, flatulent" oafs, given a Nazi salute in an episode about BMWs, and labelled Australians "convicts", raves about New Zealand in his column in today's London Sunday Times.

New Zealand, he writes, is "absolutely stunning; bite-the-back-of-your-hand-to-stop-yourself-from-crying-out lovely".

Clarkson was briefly in New Zealand last week to film an episode of his BBC motoring show, including a race from Coromandel to the Far North between a car and an America's Cup yacht.

He has since left for the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen - by the sounds of it, regretfully.

With characteristic humility, Clarkson uses his newspaper column to advise God that he made a mistake when choosing the Middle East as his religious base.

"If you were God and you were all-powerful, you wouldn't select Bethlehem as a suitable birthplace for your only child because it's a horrible place.

"And you certainly wouldn't let him grow up anywhere in the Holy Land.

"What you'd actually do is choose New Zealand."

If God really were all-knowing, continues Clarkson, "children at Christmas time today would be singing 'Oh little town of Wellington' and people would not cease from mental fight until Jerusalem had been built in Auckland's green and pleasant land."

Perhaps the most startling compliment, however, is Clarkson's claim that if God had got it right, "Jesus would have been from Palmerston North", a stark deviation from the verdict of his countryman John Cleese, who once said the North Island city should be renamed "suicide capital of New Zealand" because "if you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick".

Clarkson is better known for mean-minded and borderline racist insults than glowing compliments.

In 2007 he attracted flak for not only calling the Malaysian-manufactured Perodua Kelisa the "worst car in the world", but suggesting that it had been built by "jungle people who wear leaves as shoes".

In 2005 he gave a Nazi salute while reviewing a car from the German company BMW, and said the vehicle's satellite-navigation "only goes to Poland".

While filming in India in 2011 he drove through slums in a Jaguar fitted with a wooden-seated toilet in the boot, which he said was "perfect for India, because everyone who comes here gets the trots".

Immediately before arriving in New Zealand, Clarkson was in Australia, where he called Sydney Harbour "a river", suggested the city's Harbour Bridge was over-engineered, and referred to a group of press photographers as "convicts" - comments that saw him labelled "the biggest muppet in the world", "obnoxious" and "gutless" by the Australian press.