Jeremy Clarkson “shocked” after column controversy regarding Duchess of Sussex

TV personality Jeremy Clarkson has said he is “shocked” that he has “caused so much pain.”

He wrote a column for a newspaper about the Duchess of Sussex and he wrote, “At night I can’t sleep lying there gritting my teeth and dreaming of the day when she [Meghan] will walk naked through the streets of every town in Great Britain. Britain has to parade, while the crowd chants ‘Shame!’ shouts and throws chunks of feces at her.” This is a reference to an episode of the Game of Thrones series.

“Everyone my age thinks the same way,” he added. “But what makes me despair is that younger people, especially girls, think she’s pretty cool. They think she was a prisoner of Buckingham Palace, forced to talk about nothing but embroidery and kittens.”

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.

— Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) December 19, 2022

More than 12,000 complaints were submitted to Ipso, the independent press standards organisation. The column is now deleted. Clarkson later tweeted that he would be “more careful”.

His own daughter, Emily, also said, “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything my father wrote about Meghan Markle.”