Moaning Markles cancel out the Caveman Clarksons
An apology is never enough for the motley crew of puritans, political opportunists, and perpetual victims crowding our shaming age.
In his memoir, the Duke of Sussex has some fruity things to say about former editor of News of the World and The Sun Rebekah Brooks. “She was hunting the Spare, straight out, and making no apologies for it. She wouldn’t stop until my balls were nailed to her office wall,” he writes.
No sensible reader believes that Brooks literally wanted Harry’s crown jewels draped on her wall. Instead, we understand that Harry’s allusion to naked body bits and violence helped him add some attention-grabbing colour to describe a woman he detests.
We know Harry loathes Brooks because he told us that too.
The aggrieved Duke described her as a “loathsome toad”.
“Everyone who knew her was in full agreement that she was an infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist,” he wrote.
I offer up these descriptions as some context to Jeremy Clarkson’s vile descriptions of Harry’s wife. Clarkson has made a fortune from playing an irreverent, big-mouthed, neanderthal buffoon. And good luck to him. He’s also got form when it comes to doing some really stupid things.
The BBC gave him the boot in 2015 after the top-rating Top Gear host decked a director over a dispute about the absence of hot food after a day’s filming.
A year later, Mark Thompson, who finished his stint as director-general of the BBC in 2012, before the Clarkson fracas, told The Sunday Times that “Clarkson can be a deeply objectionable individual, and I say that as a friend”.
“I don’t think people should punch their colleagues. It’s hard to keep them if they do.”
He added: “But I would say his pungent, transgressive, slightly out-of-control talent was something the BBC could ill afford to lose. (Clarkson) spoke to people who didn’t find much else in the BBC.”
All of that is true. When Clarkson is at his best, he is brilliantly funny, especially about cars. Humour being a personal thing, I accept that while I find the man boorish and narcissistic, some find his other forays very funny too. Amazon certainly agreed; they snaffled him up for The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm.
None of that excuses Clarkson’s column in The Sun last December. It was vile. I am forced to repeat what he said, in parts, for reasons that will become obvious later. Clarkson wrote that he loathed Meghan “on a cellular level”. He said he was “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”. He added: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.”
It was an allusion to one of the more gut-wrenching scenes from Game of Thrones when Cersei is sentenced to a public penitential walk for adultery by the puritanical Sparrow.
It wasn’t a very clever comparison by Clarkson. First because Meghan has more in common with the po-faced Sparrow. And secondly because soon enough it would be him, not Markle, doing the walk of atonement.
Clarkson has been admonished – rightly and globally – for his ill-chosen words. The Sun has apologised. He has apologised, including personally, by email to the Markles. But this couple of celebrity victims couldn’t possibly accept Clarkson’s apology and still keep up their appearance as celebrity victims. They had to dig in, accuse him of other acts of wickedness to maintain their status. (The royal family might want to keep that in mind as they ponder if, and how, they respond to Harry’s allegations of them.)
Now we find the tables have turned. Clarkson has been metaphorically stripped bare, paraded through the streets as people yell “Shame!” and throw proverbial excrement at him.
Lest anyone take offence, I am not intending this in the literal sense. Simply to add some colour to the puritanical hysteria that has gone on too long about Clarkson’s column. There are reports that Amazon is calling time on Clarkson, and ITV, where he presented Who Wants to be a Millionaire, may also part ways with him.
There are a few things going on here. First, to justify the complete destruction of someone like Clarkson, it requires that we take what he said literally. If it was just a lurid turn of phrase, then it is not so different to Harry alluding to a woman wanting to snip off his testicles to hang on her office wall.
People try to make a point or try to make us laugh by making ridiculous statements or doing silly things no one is meant to take literally. When Harry called Brooks a toad, he didn’t mean an actual toad. Comedians such as Ricky Gervais are routinely accused of being hateful for saying things that their critics take literally. Taking comedy literally would be the end of comedy.
Clarkson made a terrible joke. He tried to be funny when expressing his utter (and widely shared) exasperation with the moaning Meghan. The Sun’s editors didn’t suggest the paragraph be pulled; presumably they understood that this was simply Clarksonesque hyperbole.
The second thing growing like a cultural virus is the cohort of po-faced puritans who take everything literally, in order to take maximum offence, in order to impose the maximum penalty. Stripping someone bare, shouting shame at them, throwing shit at them has become their chosen sport, with a win signalling the complete obliteration of the shamed person’s worth.
The final thing afoot in our shaming age is that an apology is never enough for the motley crew of puritans, political opportunists, and perpetual victims. As Allison Pearson wrote in London’s Telegraph: “To err is human, to forgive is divine. Ah but in 2023, to cancel is even better.”
Think of the NSW Premier’s confession a few weeks ago that he wore a Nazi uniform at his dress-up themed 21st birthday. It was dumb, and not very funny. He has apologised. Unlike Harry, he didn’t blame some older brother. He took full responsibility for his 21-year-old self.
Dominic Perrottet’s apology was not enough for some. For them the only acceptable outcome is his removal as premier. While Labor obsessives like Bob Carr and Bruce Hawker cannot let it go, the NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has been gracious and sensible, describing the apology as “sincere” and “heartfelt.” “I don’t think it will affect the election on March 25,” said Minns. Minns will earn a great deal of respect for being the adult in a sea of performance crybabies.
The confluence of these three forces won’t augur well for us. When there is no proportionality, when nothing short of total public annihilation will do for the puritans, we will soon stop distinguishing between different sorts of offences. If the criminal justice system can dole out different penalties, we, as a society, trying our best to navigate interpersonal bumps and scrapes, should aim to do the same. Otherwise we will lose track of what’s really bad. And soon enough it will be one of us who is forced to do this ridiculous walk of shame.
To stem this odious puritanical tide, I’m in near agreement with The Telegraph’s Pearson when she said she “would rather a world full of Clarksons than Meghan Markles”.
Maybe not a world full of either.
Pearson, too, wasn’t intending us to take her literally. The point is that we ought to make room for irreverent Clarksons who don’t take the world seriously, if we make room for the po-faced cohort of Markle-style puritans who take everything too seriously. They balance each other out perfectly.
More Coverage
