Why Jeremy Clarkson’s Meghan Markle apology falls short – or does it?

He’s trying, but he’s not there yet. Jeremy Clarkson has publically apologised after calling for Meghan Markle to be paraded around naked with fruit thrown at her in a recent Sun column. It’s not surprising: backlash included 60 MPs expressing concern as well as thousands of complaints from viewers. His farm show, Clarkson’s Farm, is now reportedly cancelled by Amazon.

There are parts of his apology that feel sincere, but other parts feel concerning to me. “So can I move on now?” he asks in the letter, posted on social media. “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.”

‘Vigilant’ implies Clarkson perceives danger or threat from the readers for what he’s saying – I’d argue the real danger is coming from him

But no one wants you to deliver a health and safety seminar, Jeremy! That the presenter seems to think such a thing suggests to me that he still doesn’t quite get what went wrong.

One word in particular, “vigilant,” is a weird choice. Vigilant implies keeping a watch out for danger. The sentence implies he perceives danger or threat from the readers for what he’s saying, when I’d argue the real danger is coming from him.

Graham Norton summed it up well recently when he spoke on cancel culture, explaining cleverly that accountability is key – that people need to be accountable for their own actions and words. Let’s imagine Jeremy Clarkson’s sentence were slightly different and he was asking whether it’s hard to be “interesting and accountable.” I’d imagine many of us would argue no, it isn’t, it’s just part of our daily lives.

I believe Clarkson must start seeing his journey as a move towards accountability; that every sentence uttered in a paper that prints over one million copies is his chance to rethink his own values and attitudes and question whether what he writes in his articles is “horrible,” as he puts it in his apology.

Not only would this approach protect the mental health of the people Clarkson writes about but it would be a useful exercise for the writer and presenter while he seeks to find balance in his writing.

With his ITV jobs like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on the line, the presenter was forced to think beyond carelessness for his own career’s sake, and the optimist in me hopes we can look back at this apology as a turning point. Particularly when it comes to male writers being held accountable for the way they write about females in the public eye.

Jeremy Clarkson can be highly entertaining – he’ll hopefully get funnier still when he realises it’s on him to provide the jokes, not wait for us to be offended.

THE OPPOSING VIEW…

City A.M. has always been a place for diverse opinion – and that includes within the office. In my view, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup; a turn of phrase in a column to illustrate a point blown up into some kind of diplomatic incident, as if a few words in a newspaper column are going to cause some heretofore apathetic Royalist to turn into a violent thug.

Words have consequences, and we should be careful how we use them. Clarkson’s comments were, at best, vulgar and misjudged. But getting three weeks of news out of a throwaway comment says a lot about our always-on outrage culture. Andy Silvester, Editor, City A.M.

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