Where would we be without Jeremy Clarkson? The motor-mouth petrol-head is the unlikely saviour of Twitter addicts this Christmas, giving ever-online politicos the change to proclaim their utter disgust at his now-removed Sun column about Meghan Markle. Clarkson has now apologised for saying how he’d like to see the Duchess of Sussex being paraded through the streets and compared her to serial killer Rose West. Even Clarkson’s daughter denounced him.
It’s not an analogy that first came to mind for Steerpike, but it’s a free country – isn’t it? Unfortunately we saw something else in the reaction to Clarkson: a desire to jail him, or at very least invent a crime to find him guilty of. Below are four of the more eye-catching reactions to his column: Mr S leaves his readers to judge whether they are proportionate or not…
Chris Packham
The eco-activist has called for Clarkson to be jailed for his words, describing it as a ‘hate crime, pure and simple.’ A onetime BBC colleague of Clarkson’s, the Springwatch presenter wrote online that ‘if there were any sort of justice there would be laws that would jail him and shut down the publisher.’
Stella Creasy MP
Creasy is never one to miss an opportunity to promote her campaign to make misogyny a hate crime and the Labour backbencher was swift in her condemnation, claiming the ‘best response to hatred [that] Jeremy Clarkson and others promote of women’ is to ‘recognise in law as we do with other forms of hate the crimes it drives.’ The implication here is that Clarkson could be tried under this law for hatred of women.
John Nicholson MP
‘I do not believe Jeremy Clarkson should be allowed back on our screens’ declared the SNP frontbencher in a letter he shared on Twitter, addressed to the head of ITV. So you’d ban someone from television for a comment he made in a newspaper. With regards to Clarkson’s Game of Thrones reference, Nicolson said it was ‘an insight into a disturbed mind, openly expressing violent high speech’ and that ‘it would be especially inappropriate for him to be used as a presenter by any public service broadcaster.’
He also shared his outrage that Clarkson’s words about Nicola Sturgeon in the same column ‘suggesting that ‘comparing the democratically elected leader of Scotland’ to a ‘renowned serial killer does not help in your stated purposes of championing better mental health or embracing diversity. The very opposite is true.’
65 cross-party MPs
Amid a wave of strikes, the NHS collapsing and economic decline, dozens of MPs found time to co-author a letter to the editor of the Sun, condemning ‘in the strongest terms the violent misogynistic language against the Duchess of Sussex’, insisting that ‘we cannot allow this type of behaviour to go unchecked any longer’ and that ‘an unreserved apology’ be ‘issued to Ms Markle immediately,’ that ‘action is taken against Mr Clarkson’ and ‘definitive action is taken to ensure no article like this is ever published again.’
Did Clarkson go too far? His apology suggests that he now thinks he did – but he didn’t break any law or the Editor’s Code of Practice. Free speech is a right for all – and that does mean the right to offend. But as Labour prepares for power with a press review still in the air, don’t be surprised if Clarkson gate is used later as a pretext to end free speech.
Politicians telling newspapers what they can and can’t publish. Can’t see that going wrong!
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