Jeremy Clarkson discriminated against the Duchess of Sussex when he used an article in the Sun to describe his “hatred” of her with a series of sexist tropes, a press regulator has ruled.
Clarkson used his national newspaper column to describe how he hated Meghan on a “cellular level” and suggested she had used “vivid bedroom promises” to transform Prince Harry into a “warrior of woke”.
He said he disliked the duchess more than the serial killer Rose West and dreamed of the day “when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) concluded that, taken collectively, these references discriminated against Meghan as a woman. It ordered the Sun to publish a front-page statement explaining out how its star columnist breached anti-discrimination rules, which will run in Saturday’s print edition and on its website.
Clarkson’s piece attracted more than 25,000 complaints from members of the public when it was published last December. The ruling poses a headache for ITV and Amazon, which have to decide whether to offer Clarkson new contracts to present shows such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Clarkson’s Farm.
The original column was pulled from the internet last year, after days of negative publicity, with Clarkson saying the comments about Meghan being publicly shamed were a reference to a scene in Game of Thrones that had been misinterpreted.
A spokesperson for the Sun said the newspaper regretted publishing Clarkson’s column and highlighted the newspaper’s high female readership, as well as its campaigns on domestic abuse and the cost of being a young mother.
However, Ipso’s ruling shows the Sun initially tried to push back on claims that Clarkson broke anti-discrimination rules, telling the press regulator that the author was a polemicist “known for employing hyperbolic language”.
It initially argued that Clarkson’s comments about Meghan “were criticisms of her conduct” rather than about her identity. They argued that to see sexism or racism in a column that did not explicitly mention the duchess’s sex or race would require “psychic divination” on the part of the reader.
In response, the regulator emphasised that it allowed journalists at member publications to write “mean-spirited or cruel” pieces that were “tasteless or offensive” in the name of freedom of speech. But it concluded that the collective number of attacks on women in Clarkson’s column tipped over into discrimination.
Charlotte Dewar, the chief executive of Ipso, said: “The editors’ code of practice protects the right of commentators to challenge, to shock, be satirical and entertain, but it states that the press must avoid discriminatory references towards an individual.”
However, Ipso cleared Clarkson of discriminating against Meghan on the grounds of race. The regulator said using the phrase “warrior of woke” in the context of the duchess did not amount to a pejorative reference to her skin colour because “woke” is now used to mean much more than race-based activism.
Dewar told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think the committee’s view was there was there were clearly references to the Duchess of Sussex’s sex throughout the article. There were passages that were cited in the complaint and the committee acknowledged why some would feel that they had racial connotations absolutely, but there wasn’t sufficient there to establish to the level required that there was a breach of the code on that point.”
Clarkson has previously said he was sorry “from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head” and had directly apologised to Prince Harry and Meghan, as well as the companies he worked for.
In response the duchess publicly accused Clarkson of writing articles that “spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny”.
The ruling comes at a politically tricky time for Ipso, which was founded by newspaper groups opposed to government-backed regulation of the press after the Leveson inquiry into press ethics. Labour is considering how best to regulate the press if it wins the next general election, while Meghan’s husband Prince Harry is pursuing a phone-hacking legal case against the Sun as part of a wider battle with British tabloids.
The complaint against Clarkson’s column was led by the Fawcett Society and the Wilde Foundation, which claimed it was the first time Ipso had upheld a complaint about sexism.
Harriet Harman, the new chair of the Fawcett Society, said the ruling was a “big step forward for women in the battle against sexism in the media.”
“Women are no longer prepared to endure the sexism that generations of women have been subjected to. Fawcett will be vigilant about sexism in the media and challenge it wherever it appears,” she said.
Jemima Olchawski, the society’s chief executive, said the seven-month battle to get a ruling against Clarkson had been gruelling. “We’re a charity funded by members and to go up against the Sun and its legal team is a big thing to have taken on – we’ve had to spend valuable time and resources arguing what is self-evident: this should just never have been published,” she said.
“It shouldn’t be this difficult and I genuinely worry that the odds are stacked against those who call out breaches in press standards through Ipso.”
