Jeremy Clarkson's *very* white Christmas
Jeremy Clarkson's *very* white Christmas
His column about the Duchess of Sussex is just another symptom of a rotten system.
Previously: A shower of bastards in search of an audience
The response to Netflix's 'Harry & Meghan' is telling, predictable, and pathetic.
Victoria Newton, editor of The Sun, was a guest on the 18th December 2022 edition of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, as part of a panel commenting on news stories from across the year, which also included Good Morning Britain’s Susanna Reid and Britain’s most prominent trendy youth pastor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. When the discussion turned to Harry and Meghan, the following exchange took place:
Kuenssberg: Now, Victoria, in those programmes and in the newspapers, there’s a real narrative from Harry and Meghan that there was somehow a conspiracy against them from the palace and parts of the British press.
As the editor of The Sun, you probably know more about that than almost anyone in the country. Does that stack up?
Newton: A hundred per cent not. We had lots of dealings with the press offices for Harry and Meghan, and, in particular, I’ve remembered some of my dealings with them, going back to when they were still in the family. Never once was I given a negative story about other members of the Royal Family to look after William and Kate for example.
And, in fact, a lot of the time we were given more positive stories about Harry and Meghan from the royal household. I can give you a really good example: We found out when it was going to be Meghan’s hen do and we kindly agreed that we wouldn’t say where it was so it wouldn’t ruin the event for her so she could still go and have a nice time, whilst we still got the story. That was personally agreed with Prince Harry. So the idea that we were always favouring William and Kate, and the other royals, over them is simply not true.
Let’s start with the question; it’s not even remotely formulated to provide “balance”, it’s the journalistic equivalent of giving Newton an open goal. Notice phrases like “a real narrative”, “somehow a conspiracy” and “does that stack up?” which make it clear where Kuenssberg stands on the issue even as she pantomimes ‘objectivity’.
The idea that Harry and Meghan’s perspective is being published in the newspapers is also a ludicrous framing. Quotes and scenes from the Netflix documentary are used in reports in highly selective and abbreviated ways. Just look at how Meghan’s anecdote about overdoing a curtsy was reframed as “mocking British traditions”.
Then there’s the answer in which Newton is allowed to ignore Prince Harry’s ongoing legal action against The Sun and its parent company News UK, and to claim without challenge that the paper was “given more positive stories about Harry and Meghan”. Newton wasn’t the overall editor of The Sun in 2018 when the hen do stories were published but she had been the editor of The Sun on Sunday since 2013.
However, what was most egregious about Newton’s appearance, is that Kuenssberg entirely failed to mention Jeremy Clarkson’s Sun column published the day before which included his lurid fantasy of Meghan being marched naked through the streets and pelted with shit. It is not credible that Kuenssberg, the programme’s editor, and the production team would not be aware of the column or the furious response to it, which has been covered by other newspapers and includes responses from a wide range of prominent figures as well as a huge number of members of the public.
It was already a journalistic failure — and a reflection of Sunday’s broken format — that Kuenssberg gave Newton such a softball question and then chummily accepted her assertions but to ignore the Clarkson column was a glaring example of media solidarity. Look again at how Kuenssberg buttered up Newton (“As editor of The Sun, you probably know more about that than almost anyone in the country.”)
What Clarkson wrote in Saturday’s Sun1 — and which was approved by a series of editors and production staff — goes far beyond rhetoric or fair comment. He wrote:
I actually feel rather sorry for [Harry2] because today he’s just a glove puppet with no more control over what he says or does than Basil Brush.
Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level.
At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming 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.
Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.
Rose West was a serial killer. Nicola Sturgeon and the Duchess of Sussex are simply women who Jeremy Clarkson disdains; their great offence is to not please him. Unlike Queen Camilla who enjoyed his company at a party just this week.
Clarkson has three children. If I were to publish a lurid and violent fantasy about his daughter being stripped and publicly humiliated, I would soon receive a letter from his extremely expensive lawyers. But the same rules do not apply to him or his enablers at News UK who chuckle away at the abuse dolled out by ‘star’ columnists.
As part of discovery during her ultimately unsuccessful employment discrimination action against The Times, Katherine O’Donnell gained access to emails that show the attitude of senior executives and editors at News UK.
In 2016, O’Donnell — then still Night Editor of The Times in Scotland — complained to News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks about a 2016 Sunday Times column in which Clarkson wrote of trans people:
As far as I was concerned, men who want to be women were only really to be found on the internet or in the seedier bits of Bangkok. They were called ladyboys, and in my mind they were nothing more than the punchline in a stag night anecdote.
Replying to O’Donnell’s long and reasoned email3 was delegated to other execs by Brooks, who wrote to them:
Can you direct response for me please. Jeremy upsets everyone which is his genius. A bit like private Wu — he takes no prisoners and I am sure Trans group are as upset as the Welsh or Mexicans or greenies by his views.
Clarkson was, of course, part of the infamous “Chipping Norton set” which included Brooks, her racehorse trainer husband Charlie, and Prime Minister turned posh shed loiterer David Cameron. Her “oh, Jeremy is so naughty!” response is the same indulgence given to horrors like Giles Coren and Rod Liddle who provide the same grimly contrarian content like clockwork. Stewart Lee’s line about Clarkson is less a joke and more a simple statement of fact:
With his outrageous politically incorrect opinions he has every week to a deadline in The Sunday Times.
Clarkson’s history of indefensible comments — both explicitly and tacitly defended by the British media establishment — is so long it’d fill several editions of this newsletter. It’s worth remembering that it was not the 2014 incident when he a clip of him saying the n-word was released that led to his final dismissal from the BBC but his assault on a producer almost exactly one year later. Even then, the BBC said it was ending his contract “with great regret” and he quickly signed a huge deal with Amazon.
Clarkson lives in a consequence-free bubble because of his “genius”; the genius of the pub bore and the bumptious bigot. His career is sustained by millions of other pricks who wish they could be so richly rewarded for “saying it how it is”, where what it is boils down to lazy xenophobia, cheap racism, and the shock tactics of everyone’s most hated uncle after six pints at Christmas.
The Meghan column will soon be just another item in the ‘Controversies’ section of Clarkson’s Wikipedia page, which already requires four sub-headings. Columnists like Clarkson are richly rewarded for this behaviour and supported by a system that profits from their politically incorrect opinions delivered to a deadline.
In today’s Sun on Sunday, Tony Parsons, another long-time purveyor of pathetic views for cash, tries the same trick as Clarkson…
A new poll by YouGov suggests Harry and Meghan are now the least popular royals, with only Prince Andrew polling lower.
I disagree.
I’d even prefer Andrew over this self-pitying pair any day.
… while in The Sunday Times, Camilla Long, who won columnist of the year at the Press Awards this week, writes:
Awful, cynical people ricochet in and out of their lives like pinballs: the ridiculous Widow Twanky figure of Tyler Perry, for example, who lent the couple his giant, turd-like mansion overlooking “celebrities” and California scrub. “Another amazing friend who we’ve never met,” trilled Harry. Now indebted to Perry, they tell us they offered up their daughter as payment — would he be Lilibet’s godfather?
Long’s piece contains more racist red flags than the time the KKK accidentally left a pair of scarlet boxers in with a whites wash.
Harry and Meghan remain public figures by circumstance and action. They just released a six-part documentary series about their lives. That would lead to criticism and analysis even if the behaviour of the press and wide media wasn’t one of the central themes. But time and again the output of royal reporters and columnists in particular goes far beyond even the furthest bounds of reasonable criticism.
Journalists who stay silent about Clarkson’s behaviour are cowards, but that was evident before when Giles Coren mocked Dawn Foster’s death and his colleagues and peers withdrew into their shells and kept quiet. Publishing a fantasy of public humiliation lifted from the fictional Games of Thrones but targeting a decidedly non-fictional person would be the subject of many more outraged editorials if Meghan wasn’t already considered fair game.
Clarkson is an agent of the tabloids’ revenge and the BBC — already stained by the behaviour of its royal reporters — is made complicit by Kuenssberg’s silence. Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg is not journalism because questions that should be asked go unasked and unanswered. Newton was not treated as a subject to be interviewed but as a pal to be welcomed.
While snow in Britain is generally not settling, what readers, listeners and viewers are witnessing from much of the press and media is another very white Christmas.
Thanks to The Research Arena for reading today’s draft.
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Read more: Thin Ice
When does news reporting become voyeurism or worse emotional vampirism?
I’m using archive.is links rather than directing traffic to The Sun.
Who Clarkson refers to as “Harold” throughout.
You can read Katherine’s email here.