Clarkson and Coren in the Iron Bank
It isn't complaints from you or me that end the careers of controversialists but the cold calculations of the companies that employ them.
Previously: Jeremy Clarkson's *very* white Christmas
His column about the Duchess of Sussex is just another symptom of a rotten system.
Cersei Lannister: There must be someone at the Iron Bank you can speak to, come to some arrangement.
Tywin Lannister: The Iron Bank is the Iron Bank. There is no someone.
Cersei Lannister: Someone does work there. It is comprised of people.
Tywin Lannister: And a temple is comprised of stones. One stone crumbles and another takes its place. And the temple holds its form for 1,000 years or more. That's what the Iron Bank is... a temple. We all live in its shadow and almost none of us know it. You can't run from them. You can't cheat them. You can't sway them with excuses. If you owe them money and you don't want to crumble yourself, you pay it back.
— Game of Thrones, Season 4, Episode 5: ‘First of His Name’
For his first non-apology over his Sun column about Meghan and Harry in December, Jeremy Clarkson tweeted:
Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.
His expectation was that it would be enough; an ersatz apology made from artificial contrition, having no more relation to real regret than a foam banana sweet has to the fruit it mimics. That having failed, The Sun removed the column from its website saying Clarkson had requested that it do so, and issued a statement of regret spiked through with self-aggrandisement:
Columnists’ opinions are their own, but as a publisher, we realise that with free expression comes responsibility. We at The Sun regret the publication of this article and we are sincerely sorry.
The article has been removed from our website and archives. The Sun has a proud history of campaigning, from Help for Heroes to Jabs Army and Who Cares Wins, and over 50 years of working in partnership with charities, our campaigns have helped change Britain for the better.
Working with our readers, The Sun has helped to bring about new legislation on domestic abuse, provided beds in refuges, closed harmful loopholes in the law and empowered survivors of abuse to come forward and seek help.
We will continue to campaign for good causes on behalf of our readers in 2023.
That ‘apology’ was not signed by The Sun’s editor Victorian Newton — who wasn’t challenged about the column when she was interviewed on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on the day after it appeared — but instead used the collective voice of the paper which curiously dropped its usual ‘80s geezer tone, if not its fake moralising.
Clarkson’s Sun column has not appeared in the paper or online since.
On January 16th 2023, the same day Variety reported his Amazon deal will end when his current contract concludes in 2024, Clarkson posted an Instagram statement:
One of the strangest things I’ve noticed in recent times is that whenever an MP or a well-known person is asked to apologise for something, no matter how heartfelt or profound that apology may be, it’s never enough for the people who called for it in the first place.
So I’m going to try and buck the trend this morning with an apology for the things I said in a Sun column recently about Meghan Markle. I really am sorry. All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head. This is me putting my hands up. It’s a mea culpa with bells on.
Usually, I read what I’ve written to someone else before filing, but I was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry. So when I’d finished, I just pressed send. And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded.
It was a slow rumble to start with and I ignored it. But then the rumble got louder. So I picked up a copy of The Sun to see what the fuss was about. We’ve all been there, I guess. In that precise moment when we suddenly realise we’ve completely messed up. You are sweaty and cold at the same time. And your head pounds. And you feel sick. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Had I really said that? It was horrible.
I knew what had happened straight away. I’d been thinking of a scene in Game of Thrones, but I’d forgotten to mention this. So it looked like I was actually calling for revolting violence to rain down on Meghan’s head…
… I was mortified and so was everyone else. My phone went mad. Very close friends were furious. Even my own daughter took to Instagram to denounce me.
The Sun quickly apologised, and I tried to explain myself. But still, there were calls for me to be sacked and charged with a hate crime. More than 60 MPs demanded action to be taken. ITV, who make Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Amazon, who make the Farm Show and The Grand Tour, were incandescent.
I therefore wrote to everyone who works with me saying how sorry I was and then on Christmas morning, I e-mailed Harry and Meghan in California to apologise to them too. I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but that the language I’d used in my column was disgraceful and I was profoundly sorry.
Over the last thirty years, I have written very nearly five thousand newspaper and magazine columns, so it was inevitable that one day, I’d do a Harry Kane and sky one of the damn things. Which is what happened with the piece about Meghan.
So can I move on now? Not sure. It’s hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time. You never hear peals of laughter coming from a health and safety seminar. But I promise you this, I will try.
Who knows? Very soon now I shall be a grandfather so in future, maybe I’ll just write about that.
It’s a long statement and I’ve quoted it almost in its entirety because I want to look at what Clarkson is doing closely. It has the rough shape of an apology and includes some of the phrases you’d find in one (“mea culpa”, “apologise”, “profoundly sorry”) but it’s not one. It’s an excuse and a pitch to employers; a Haily Mary pass by someone who doesn’t want to lose work and status.
The focus again on the Games of Thrones analogy — fantasising about a woman he doesn’t know, though he is friends with her father-in-law’s wife, being paraded in the street naked and pelted with shit — is deceptive. The line he and his defenders want to ignore is the one that came before it:
I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.
The pretence of the ‘mea culpa’ statement is that a 62-year-old man with a 30-year career as a controversialist didn’t know what he was doing; he was in a rush; someone else should have stopped him, and that, when they didn’t, surely he was punished enough by the anger of others including his own daughter (herself engaged in a PR move). He raises that very daughter’s pregnancy as a clumsy attempt to humanise himself (“I’m just a silly old grandfather.”) and a suggestion of content to come.
But in that avalanche of verbiage and excuses, I think only one sentence matters and it leads us to another Games of Thrones comparison…
ITV, who make Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Amazon, who make the Farm Show and The Grand Tour, were incandescent.
It’s not the thousands of complaints to the toothless press regulator IPSO which have scared Clarkson or that Prince Harry referenced the column in his TV interviews to promote Spare but the threat of losing the favour of News UK, ITV, and Amazon; that while he’s insanely wealthy, he might no longer have those well-paid opportunities to revel in the sound of his own voice. Clarkson isn’t scared of the people or even the prince, he’s scared of the Iron Bank.
In the Song of Ice and Fire books and their TV adaptation, Game of Thrones, the Iron Bank of Braavos is rich, powerful, and secretive. Its decision-making is oblique and its temperament is ruthless. With it on your side, victory is almost guaranteed. Amazon is an Iron Bank; News Corp is an Iron Bank. ITV is… a company that employs Ant & Dec.
A media analyst, speaking anonymously to Stephen Armstrong for a piece in The Daily Telegraph yesterday, said:
Amazon’s only interest in anything it makes or sells is does it make a profit? This is a company that sells Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, The Big Book of Serial Killers and Prime Video has a documentary on Charles Manson’s final words. I don’t think Jeremy Clarkson is quite in that league.
I agree; Jeremy Clarkson is evil, he just lacks ambition. But elsewhere in the Telegraph, specifically, the fetid swamp occupied by its columnists, the argument that Amazon has “cancelled” Clarkson at the behest of Meghan is a seductive one. Madeline Grant dusts off the “comedy is forbidden now” template to write:
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 at least 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.
This is a defence offered to (usually rich, white) men who are part of the right-wing media class. Were Clarkson’s politics and pedigree not of the sort that the Telegraph admires and his target someone it doesn’t attack day in and day out, his words would have produced several outraged columns.
Allison Pearson, inevitably, writes:
To err is human, to forgive is divine, said Pope. Ah, but in 2023, to cancel is even better.
With an “incandescent” Amazon threatening to drop him, Jeremy sent a second, more grovelling mea culpa on Christmas Day. Drawing on all the moral authority that publicly trashing and alienating both of your families gives you, the Sussexes responded via a spokesman: “While a new public apology has been issued by Mr Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny. Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’, as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”
All together now, “Oh, for God’s sake!” They really are insufferable, aren’t they? Say what you like about Jeremy Clarkson, he would never write anything as cringeworthy as “hate rhetoric”. He likes the English language far too much to do that to it.
What we have here, I’m afraid, is a clash of worlds. Jeremy Clarkson is not a comedian, but his basic approach to the world is comic. He is anti-earnest, anti-solemn, anti self-importance as all good comic writers and presenters always have been. Now, he finds himself at the heart of the humourless, a place where deliberate exaggeration is bound to cause trouble, so more cautious souls stick to the grimly literal for fear of being taken amiss. And all the fun slowly drains out of life.
… I met Jeremy once on holiday and liked him enormously. Whatever he is full of, it’s certainly not hate. (What Prince Harry and Meghan are full of is another matter.) Rather, he exudes a buoyant goodwill and a refusal to take things seriously that cheers everyone up. It has deservedly made him one of the most popular TV figures of our pious, finger-wagging age.
You know, I would far rather have a world full of Jeremy Clarksons than Meghan Markles. I’m sure that things feel pretty serious for him right now, with the woke witchfinders at the door, but let’s hope good times and high spirits return soon. We need him more than ever.
As ever the question is who’s “we”? And having read far more of Allison Pearson’s output than is sensible for any person’s health I know she hasn’t got the faintest idea of how to write jokes but is a world expert in self-importance and humourlessness.
The line “I met Jeremy once on holiday and liked him enormously,” cracks Pearson’s usual claim to be outside the “metropolitan media elite” and ladles on lashings of self-importance while she’s at it. “The woke witchfinders” at Clarkson’s door at from the Iron Bank of Amazon, their issue is that people in America aren’t watching him prattling about on his farm, and the punishment might be that one of his many large contracts runs out without being re-upped.
A discussion on Times Radio about Clarkson provoked a revealing rant from another of the Iron Bank’s beneficiaries: Giles Coren:
… the thing that worries me is that for a long time, we talked about our toothless press regulator, we’ve got a new one that’s pretty toothless, except we’ve got another new press regulator which appears to be Meghan Markle. And I don’t know if as an unappointed body containing only one person if that’s the right thing.
Don’t forget she ended Piers Morgan and now she’s ended Jeremy Clarkson. Whatever people think about them, they were our two most outspoken…
[Aasmah Mir interjects: But they’re not ended, they’re both working still, aren’t they?]
… well, okay, Piers is sort of working. He has a lot of money but he’s not in the position he was. No, of course, I don’t believe in cancel culture.
I’ve detailed the many, many times Coren has slunk up to the bar at the Last Chance Saloon and then slunk back out again in previous editions.
I am living proof that you can’t be cancelled. I’ve had all sorts of hell storms, and I’m still here and I’m doing better than ever. And I kind of like it; I kind of soak it up and get a little bit stronger, like some terrible Marvel super-villain who the more you hit him with nuclear power, the more nuclear he becomes.
But, apart from anything else, Piers’ mainstream career — and hurrah! for Talk TV and all that, obviously, we think it’s great but he’s not on national network television anymore and nobody — does he still have a column? Nobody really reads it if he does. He’s been brought low. He’s lost… Tigger has lost his jump there. He’s not a charming performer, although he’s a perfectly charming man — and I don’t really miss him. Jeremy is sort of loud, brilliant, and occasionally makes terrible mistakes which happens when you’re pushing the envelope — she sort of ended him too.
This section, where Coren talks down the £50 million three-year deal that Morgan signed with their ultimate boss Rupert Murdoch is the kind of blathering that will see him slip out of favour with the Iron Bank and its representative on Earth, News UK CEO (and likely future News Corp CEO) Rebekah Brooks. The column that Coren says “no one really reads” is in The Times’ sister paper The Sun.
Next, we come to a rehash of a topic Coren’s written about several times — the apparent forthcoming “cancellation” of the UK’s surfeit of old white male columnists. It’s a subject close to Coren’s heart since as heir to his father’s Times column:
I’m friends with Jeremy, I love Jeremy, I don’t approve of all the work he does — I would never stand up and defend that column because the mob may come for me. But he’s been brought down. I look around and I go: Who’s next? Which next slightly old, white, British controversial columnist are they gonna kill? The fact that it’s arbitrated by Meghan, I think is a little bit dangerous. People seem to have forgotten that Jeremy was joking — it was a terrible joke, it wasn’t funny, it was disgusting, he…
[Aasmah Mir interjects: And he’s apologised so he obviously thought it was wrong.]
And they’ve not accepted it.
Here’s the part where Coren’s wizened conscience — the bony-fingered spectre that stops him sleeping at night — took control of his mouth:
I did a terrible, terrible thing on Twitter 18 months ago and it led to all sorts of hell and unquestionably loss of work and all kinds of things. And people either know what it is or they don’t. And I never apologised, although I was sorry as hell. And I wish I hadn’t done it for the person who was…
[Aasmah Mir interjects: Well, you just have, you have just apologised…]
I haven’t apologised. I haven’t given a formal apology because…
[Aasmah Mir interjects: No, but on air you have…]
I haven’t… oh, alright, I have then. I don’t know. You know who told me — the person who argued against apology? It was Danny Finkelstein, he wrote a brilliant column in The Times, that said:
Never apologise because they ask for an apology and once you’ve given them the apology, they’ll ask for something else…
The “terrible, terrible thing” that Coren did — one of many terrible things he has done in his life — was to mock the death of Dawn Foster on Twitter. Dawn was a friend to a lot of people, including me, and we won’t forgive or forget what Coren did at a time when grief about her sudden and untimely death was at its rawest. He wrote:
When someone dies who has trolled you on Twitter, saying vile and hurtful things about you and your family, is it okay to be like, “I’m sorry for the people who loved you, and any human death diminishes me, but HA HA HA HA HA HA”?
The tweet from Dawn which Coren felt justified that response to her death was written two years earlier. It is Foster’s Law:
Giles Coren a prime example of how the “if I’ve heard of yer da, I don’t need to hear from you” rule holds for almost every man bar Jesus.
I’ve written before about what he did and also about what made Dawn brilliant. Coren faced no consequences beyond the expiration of his contract with the BBC and the brief appearance of graffiti on his front wall. He now pretends he’s not on Twitter while hiding behind sock puppets.
As with every time he appears on their show, Stig ‘cockroaches column’ Abell and Aasmah Mir chuckled along with Coren this morning. They treated his rant as just another entertaining diversion from the clown columnist. They only winced when he did the Iron Bank down.
Laughing at a young woman’s death, accusing another journalist of being a paedophile, fantasising about killing and fucking a neighbour’s child, writing a sexualised account of a holiday with his toddler daughter, fat shaming his son in Esquire, using a racist sock puppet account to attack his critics, countless examples of racism in his published work… none of these things will stop Coren while he remains a jester for the court. But if he keeps mocking the Iron Bank, they’ll quickly put an end to his sinecure in The Times comment section.
The only things that end the careers of British controversialist columnists are the decisions of editors and capricious angry proprietors.
Dawn Foster forever, and may Giles Coren’s car never go unstolen.
Thanks to John Hill for reading today’s draft.
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The year 2040 - outside a flat-roofed pub a now dishevelled Giles Coren struggles to regain consciousness. He travels the land, baiting regulars to fight him for clicks so long as he can write something sneering about them once he regains consciousness. He still has a column in the Times - it’s still shite.