Tactical retreat and the coward Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson will face no consequences but his defenders and enablers will pretend he has suffered.

Previously: Jeremy Clarkson's *very* white Christmas
His column about the Duchess of Sussex is just another symptom of a rotten system.

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Jeremy Clarkson did not write an apology. Look at the words he 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.

That’s the same register as Paddington Bear exclaiming after he sits on a marmalade sandwich, a faux-eccentric pootling pose. Poor Jeremy, who’s a mere 62 years old and has been writing columns for more than half his life, just tripped, fell, and accidentally struck the appropriate keys to compose a lurid fantasy about a woman being stripped naked and marched through the streets to be pelted with shit. His misfortune was compounded by The Sun editing, laying out, and publishing it.

Clarkson is not “horrified”, he is inconvenienced. He’s got the wrong kind of attention and would like it to go away now. It was a bare minimum statement delivered with a sly sideways look to his fans (“See what they’ve made me do.”)

Similarly, The Sun removing the column — “at Jeremy’s request” — was done in the hope that it will be swiftly forgotten, consigned to the extensive Controversies section of Clarkson’s Wikipedia page. It is tactical self-censorship; burying the evidence after the words have already served their purpose.

Clarkson’s previous Sun column with its headline ‘I had argument with someone – we both agreed Meghan Markle is unhinged monster, but couldn’t agree just how awful she is’ remains. In September, after the Queen’s death, he used the column to write:

When [Meghan] dies, hopefully many years from now, she will not be carried in front of millions by stoic men with good hearts and strong arms.

 If it’s a slow news day, the best she’ll get is a small obituary in The Times on Page 27. 

In the same article, he called Harry “cuntstruck” or rather “****struck” because, for all its crassness, The Sun is prissier than a Victorian schoolmarm about swearing.

One of the reasons that both Clarkson and his inevitable defenders are focusing on the ‘Game of Thrones’ section of the latest column is because he also did the “Meghan beguiled Harry with sex” line again:

… along came Meghan, who obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.

By pretending it was only the lurid humiliation fantasy that people objected to, Clarkson, The Sun, and the contrarians rushing to defend them, can claim it was one bad joke. But he compared Meghan (and Nichola Sturgeon) to the serial killer Rose West, said he “hate[s] her on a cellular level”, and used a grab bag of racist tropes about black women bamboozling white men with sex.

The key line in the whole column is this one:

Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.

Clarkson assumed he had safety in numbers. Laura Kuenssberg’s pathetic failure to even raise the uproar when The Sun’s editor Victoria Newton appeared on her show on Sunday suggested he might be right. The sheer number of complaints — 17,500 and counting — to the toothless regulator IPSO showed otherwise, forcing both columnist and paper to respond. The story was not going away.

The Guardian reported yesterday that IPSO’s chair, the former Tory minister Lord Faulks, was scheduled to attend a private dinner at Rupert Murdoch’s Mayfair flat last night. He cancelled after the paper contacted him to ask whether it was appropriate for him to meet with Murdoch even as the regulator was dealing with the complaints against Clarkson. A spokesperson said:

As part of his role as chairman of Ipso, Lord Faulks often meets publishers and editors. Lord Faulks was due to attend a longstanding engagement this evening hosted by Rupert Murdoch and attended by News UK executives.

Because of the volume of complaints about Jeremy Clarkson’s column, Lord Faulks felt his attendance would not be appropriate at this time and has explained this to the organisers.

It was never appropriate for Faulks to attend a private party with Murdoch and his executives. But then IPSO is a Potemkin regulator, created to provide the impression of regulation without any of the inconvenient consequences of it. Its leading members and backers are News UK, Associated Newspapers (the Mail titles’ parent company), and Reach (the publisher of the Mirror and Express).

Those 17,500+ complaints to IPSO may as well have been tossed into a volcano in the hope of gaining the vengeful favour of an ancient fire god. The organisation doesn’t make rulings on offensiveness and has extremely lax guidelines when it comes to comment pieces. IPSO told PA Media:

We will follow our usual processes to examine the complaints we have received. This will take longer than usual because of the volume of complaints.

Imagine if the dog from the “this is fine” meme was hired as a fire marshall — that’s IPSO. If it smells smoke, it comments on the lovely scent. It exists as a place to channel rage and dissipate it. You can complain to IPSO and feel that you’ve “done something” and the newspapers can be confident of experiencing no consequences.

Inevitably, impressively-foreheaded ultra-contrarian Brendan O’Neill has filed a piece for The Spectator in defence of Clarkson. He writes:

Those who are damning Clarkson’s column as an incitement to violence are exposing their own classism. The idea that Sun readers will not know Clarkson was joking, and will start storing up their excrement for the coming shaming of Meghan Markle, is a vile calumny against tabloid readers. Newsflash to the cultural elites: working-class people understand humour.

O’Neill is one of Britain’s top exporters of strawmen, which he produces in industrial volumes. A vanishingly small number of people believe Clarkson literally wants to see Meghan marched through the streets in shame. The objection is to someone using a national newspaper column to express lurid hatred for someone who we know has been the target of violent threats.

It’s O’Neill who is classist. From a pulpit provided by The Spectator, he purports to be the working-class whisperer, despite his conception of them seemingly excluding anyone other than a stereotype of an ageing white man. It brings to mind Kelvin MacKenzie’s caricature of a Sun reader in 1982, as recounted in Chris Horrie Stick It Up Your Punter! The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper:

He’s the bloke you see in the pub — a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdoes and drug dealers.

O’Neill summons up cartoon Sun readers in defence of the multi-millionaire public school-educated Jeremy Clarkson writing for the benefit of the Oxford-educated hereditary media baron Rupert Murdoch. Like MacKenzie, O’Neill’s contempt for the working class is shown in his willingness to use them as a homogenous block to serve his arguments.

With tedious inevitability, O’Neill pivots to a claim that Clarkson is being censored. To him, Stop Funding Hate is not simply a campaign group that encourages people to express their views to advertisers who, in turn, can choose to change where they spend their money but “plummy tryants”. Similarly, Sadiq Khan — I wonder why Brendan chose him to focus on… — is not merely expressing an opinion when he says Clarkson’s column was “dangerous and inexcusable” but:

… a politician making underhand decrees about what the press should and shouldn’t publish … [with a] desire to cleanse the press of ideas he disapproves of…

Clarkson, an internationally famous fixture of the British media for decades, with two weekly columns in national newspapers, is transformed into the reincarnation of the 18th-century radical journalist John Wilkes by O’Neill’s fevered imagination:

I feel I must remind the Clarkson-haters that inflammatory insults against royal personages are the stuff freedom of speech is built on. It is no exaggeration to say that it was earlier generations’ temerity to make rude and foul jokes about royals that expanded freedom for us all. Consider John Wilkes… whose pamphlets satirising the hell out of the sex lives and pompous antics of Kings, Lords and Ladies became the great cause celebre of liberty in the modern era.

When Wilkes was imprisoned in the Tower for writing a stinging assault on George III, vast swathes of the public rallied behind the banner ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ and demanded not only his release but also greater political and religious freedom for everybody. Today’s Clarkson-bashers, horrified that this tabloid bloke has made a joke about a duchess, would have been the other side. They’d have been in the anti-Wilkes camp, repulsed by this hack’s vile insults against royalty, frenetically demanding his punishment.

Jeremy Clarkson was partying with Queen Camilla just before his Meghan column was published. He is a close friend of News UK’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks and they were both bosom buddies of David Cameron when he was Prime Minister. Wilkes’ ghost should haunt O’Neill this Christmas for the calumnious comparison.

Wilkes was brave. Clarkson is a coward. And as for O’Neill’s conclusion that readers should read John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty and “discover [how] crude humour is the foundation stone of the freedoms you enjoy today”, send the Spiked Twitter account a picture of Brendan with an elongated forehead. You’ll be blocked faster than parliament voted to stitch Wilkes up for sedition.

For the Telegraph, Ross Clark — another Spectator writer with a face like a poorly-painted hard-boiled egg — argues that “Clarkson’s biggest mistake was to capitulate”. After explaining how he would have simply destroyed Harry and Meghan with his powerful facts and logic rather than “paddling in this swamp” like Clarkson, he writes:

… having written what he did, Clarkson made an error by appearing to apologise. That is exactly what Harry and Meghan and their supporters want: for the British press, and potentially its regulators, to be so fearful of causing offence that they grovel before them.   

Clarkson should have followed one of two examples. The first, like the best comedians, is to unashamedly defend his right to write what he did. The second would be to maintain a dignified silence: say nothing, or, at the very most insist that “interpretations of my column may vary”. 

Clarkson only “[appeared] to apologise” if you’re the sort of person who’d consider a kid muttering “sorry” while kicking you in the shins to be indicative of contrition.

Clark pretends that the British press has regulators and that Clarkson has admitted to anything. But he hasn’t. What The Sun and its columnist have done is a cowardly tactical retreat and they will attack again. Watch now as Clarkson manages to make himself the victim in all this and to profit from it again. He’ll turn this into more columns, more jokes, and more money.

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