Jeremy Clarkson’s Meghan article was sexist to duchess, press regulator rules
A column by Jeremy Clarkson in the Sun – in which he wrote about the Duchess of Sussex being paraded naked in the street – was sexist, the press regulator has ruled.
A record 25,000 people complained to Ipso, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, about the article.
The imagery was “humiliating and degrading towards the duchess”, Ipso chairman Lord Faulks said.
Prince Harry and Meghan accused Clarkson of spreading “hate rhetoric”.
They added that the article, published by the Sun in December 2022, was also spreading “dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny”.
Responding to the Ipso ruling the Sun said it “accepts that with free expression comes responsibility”.
The Sun and its columnist apologised for the column last December and removed the article from its website. However while it has said the column fell “short of its high editorial standards and should not have been published” it has not accepted that it breached the editor’s code, saying concerns raised were a “matter of taste and judgement”.
Nevertheless after investigating the article, Ipso ruled the newspaper had indeed broken its editors’ code of practice as the piece contained a “pejorative and prejudicial reference” to Meghan’s sex.
The watchdog rejected complaints that the piece was discriminatory on the grounds of race, inaccurate or sought to harass the duchess.
In the column, Clarkson wrote that he was “dreaming of the day when [Meghan] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”.
He later explained that he had been thinking of a scene in Game of Thrones, but wrote the column in a hurry and forgot to mention the TV show.
The Sun has published a summary of the regulator’s findings on the same page as the column usually appears, as well as running it on the front page of their website.
Elsewhere in the column, Clarkson wrote that he hated Meghan “on a cellular level”.
Clarkson compared his hatred of the duchess with his feelings towards former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and serial killer Rose West. The regulator found this comparison was because all three are female.
Ipso’s chief executive, Charlotte Dewar, told the BBC the regulator had considered complaints from gender equality charity The Fawcett Society and The Wilde Foundation, a charity that helps victims and survivors of abuse.
She said the remedy for this breach was the publication of Ipso’s decision for Sun readers and also for the wider public to know the reasons for the finding adding, they had conducted a “fair, independent, impartial and thorough investigation”.
She confirmed the complaints about the article had not come from the duchess.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, Ms Dewar said some complainants had felt passages had “racial connotations” but IPSO had not established these references were discriminatory.
Asked if it mattered if the Sun had not accepted that there was a breach of the editors’ code, Ms Dewar said: “What matters to many people is that they did immediately remove the article very shortly after publication and they have apologised and accepted it should not have happened.”
She said the complaint had been upheld and the finding meant the paper was required to look at the processes that led to the article.
Responded to Ipso’s ruling, the Sun said: “Half of the Sun’s readers are women and we have a very long and proud history of campaigning for women which has changed the lives of many.”
It acknowledged Ipso ruled that Clarkson’s column “contained a pejorative and prejudicial reference to the duchess’s sex”.
But it added the regulator had not upheld separate elements of the complaint – that the article was inaccurate, harassed the duchess or included discriminatory references on the grounds of race.
The BBC has contacted Prince Harry and Meghan for comment, along with Clarkson.
The Fawcett Society’s chief executive, Jemima Olchawski, called Clarkson’s column “vile and offensive”.
“This was a particularly egregious example of media misogyny, and our case was that the language in it and the tropes that Jeremy Clarkson used added up to sexism and discrimination against Meghan Markle that was harmful to her,” she told the BBC.
She called for an investigation into how these “toxic comments” made it on to the pages “of one of our biggest newspapers”.
Senior Labour MP Harriet Harman, the society’s incoming chairwoman, called Ipso’s ruling “a big step forward for women in the battle against sexism in the media”.
‘Sincerely sorry’
Clarkson has said that when he read the article in the paper, he realised he had “completely messed up”.
In January he said he had emailed the couple over Christmas 2022 to tell them “the language I’d used in my column was disgraceful and that I was profoundly sorry”.
The Sun as well as deleting the column from its website said at the time that it was “sincerely sorry”.
However, Harry and Meghan’s spokesperson dismissed that apology, accusing the paper of profiting and exploiting “hate, violence and misogyny”.
“A true apology would be a shift in their coverage and ethical standards for all,” they said.
The article attracted the highest number of complaints since Ipso was established in 2014.