Clarkson’s ITV future hangs in the balance

His joke about the Duchess of Sussex wasn’t funny, but the reaction to it revealed a much more chilling trend

JEREMY CLARKSON’S relationship with ITV is in jeopardy as the broadcaster said it had no further commitments with him beyond the next series of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

ITV is contractually obliged to film another series of the quiz show in the coming months. It has not committed to anything further, as Clarkson’s comments about the Duchess of Sussex continue to make headlines.

This week, Clarkson said his bosses at ITV and Amazon were “incandescent” about his remarks in a Sun column in December, when he said he dreamt of the Duchess being paraded naked through streets “while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”.

In December, Kevin Lygo, ITV’S head of content, described the comments as “awful” but said: “What he says in the papers, we have no control over. I think his job as a quiz host is fine.” Amazon, which makes Clarkson’s

Farm and The Grand Tour, is reportedly “likely” to part ways with Clarkson, but only after two more series of the former and several episodes of the latter.

Clarkson apologised on social media this week.

British satire has always boasted a visceral and brutal element – with a long tradition of people saying hyperbolic things for comic effect. Think of the pissing-contest from The Dunciad, Swift’s A Modest Proposal, or the Gillray sketch from which the Bank of England’s famous nickname was coined. In the 1797 cartoon, a satire on wartime financial ruin, Pitt the Younger is depicted molesting an elderly woman decked in banknotes (“The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”). “Rape! Ravishment!” she screams, as he metaphorically plunders her. More recently, there’s the Sussex Bonfire Night tradition, which replaces Guy Fawkes with topical effigies of politicians. In short – crude metaphors, scatological humour, iconoclasm; all are etched into the national DNA.

When it comes to irreverence, however, not all Sussexes are created equally. Full disclosure: I am a Jeremy Clarkson fan, liable to inhale almost everything he writes. But for me at least, that now-infamous newspaper column, in which he wrote of his heavy dislike of the Duchess of Sussex, went too far. It came across as boorish, ungallant, even deranged. His editors ought to have excised the more unsavoury parts, or made it clear that this was intended as a Game of Thrones parody. In perhaps the biggest crime a joke can commit, it wasn’t funny.

Barry Cryer once said that dissecting humour is a bit like dissecting a frog: “Nobody likes it, and the frog dies.” But surely anyone with any wit could see that Clarkson wasn’t genuinely calling for the Duchess to be dragged naked through the streets and pelted with excrement? If anything, the offence-bar ought to be higher for jokes, not just because they, by definition, aren’t fully sincere, but because humour is a precious commodity. But none of that now seems to matter.

What happened next felt inevitable; the social media storm, accusations of “inciting violence” against women. The story led the news bulletins and the BBC homepage for days. Scores of MPS signed an open letter denouncing Clarkson. Eventually, he apologised, his column was taken down, and the newspaper he writes for apologised too. But that didn’t work; the Sussexes said they didn’t believe him. So he said sorry again: saying he issued a direct apology at the time. The Sussexes rejected this too, and triumphantly seized on the apology as an admission of guilt. Now Amazon is said to be considering ending its involvement with him.

In the grand scheme of free speech issues, perhaps this is not the end of the world. Notwithstanding the nastiness of the experience, he’ll be fine – Clarkson is a wealthy man, with numerous possible platforms. The same is not true of others who end up on the sharp end of the new rules of speech. They can face career ruin, or even prison.

Nevertheless, the saga is troubling: indeed, a few other observations stick out. Firstly, bad things seem to happen to those who critique the Sussexes. In 2021 Piers Morgan lost his job for saying he “didn’t believe a word” of the Oprah interview; even though many of their claims did indeed turn out to be false. So did Sharon Osbourne, just for defending Morgan’s right to an opinion. As the writer Freddy Gray notes, for a couple who profess to scorn the trappings of monarchy, they enjoy a Lèse-majesté that, among royals in 2023, only really applies to them.

But their behaviour also reflects a common contemporary trend. Not only is language invariably taken literally, but at every step the worst possible motives are attributed. Our inbuilt assumption seems not just to overreact, but to condemn people to outer darkness indefinitely, while apologies fall on deaf ears.

Secondly, forgiveness and grace only ever seem to go one way. Back in 2005, when the concept of redemption in public life still existed, Prince Harry apologised for wearing a Nazi uniform, and was forgiven, despite his later efforts to pin it on William and Kate. I can think of one or two things the Sussexes might say sorry for; causing grief to the Queen in her final years, perhaps, or cashing in on publicity while condemning Thomas Markle for doing the same thing. Will Harry apologise to his relatives for divulging so many intimate details of their lives in

Spare, I wonder, or to the schoolteacher he mocks as “greasy and fat”?

Likewise it’s remarkable what Left-wingers can say about their opponents, free of consequences; whether it’s David Lammy comparing Erg-members to Nazis, or Miriam Margolyes and her joke-fantasies about Boris Johnson “dying from Covid”. Conservatives shouldn’t apply the same bed-wetters’ lens to life; the world is miserable enough. But if they did, it would at least confirm that there is one rule for us and another for the Left.

Then there is the involvement of politicians, like the MPS and their letter condemning Clarkson. Don’t they have anything better to do, you might ask? Apparently not. Last year, Quentin Letts, a parliamentary sketchwriter colleague from another newspaper, jokingly described a female MP “bouncing on her broomstick”. Quentin takes no prisoners with politicians of all persuasions, and it bears repeating that

he wasn’t actually saying she was a witch – he was making a joke. Yet a sour-faced assortment of MPS complained, as if Matthew Hopkins were alive and well in the Commons, and he was hauled into the Speaker’s Office for a tickingoff. It’s that half-witted literalmindedness again; attacking jokes and metaphors as sincere statements of intent. The frog is well and truly dead.