Jeremy Clarkson sings the praises of the Manchester hotel where he stayed recently

Let’s be honest. It’s not been a great few days for blokes called Jeremy.

But there’s another famous Jeremy who also happens to have a surname beginning with the letter C and ending in the letter n.

Former Top Gear presenter and journalist Jeremy Clarkson was in Manchester recently and wrote about it in yesterday’s Sunday Times.

Nothing remarkable about that you might, you might say.

But as well as the usual tongue-in-cheek insults about the locals, (according to Clarkson, in Manchester even the postmen get dressed up like Chippendales before they go out and ‘homeless ladies’ look like Ivana Trump), he had some very nice things to say about the hotel where he stayed.

Which is nice, because Clarkson isn’t usually a fan of hotels, and explains why in his column.

There are more than 17m hotel rooms in the world and all of them are wrong in some way. Some smell so powerfully of extreme cleaning products that your septum starts to bleed. Some are several miles from reception. And many have doors that are opened by electronical key cards that don’t work. Ever. So then you have to go back to reception and prove to a sceptic in a stupid waistcoat that you’re the same person who was there only two minutes earlier.

But Jeremy loved the hotel he stayed in when he was in Manchester.

Unusually, it had rooms that had plainly been designed by someone who’d stayed in a hotel before. The light switches did what I was expecting when I pushed them. You didn’t need a degree in astrophysics to open and close the windows. The temperature was maintained at a level that felt like there was no temperature at all. And the shower controls were located by the door to the cubicle, not on the other side of the icy jet that starts the moment you turn the tap.

The decor was halfway between businesslike and what I’d put in my house. I had a look round the room and some of the stuff I would happily have stolen.

High praise indeed for the grumpy old petrolhead.

Have you guessed where he stayed yet?

Step forward and congratulations, Dakota Hotel.