The press regulator Ipso ruled that Jeremy Clarkson's Sun column about the Duchess of Sussex, which imagined her being paraded naked through the streets, was sexist after drawing a record 25,000 complaints.
In the December 2022 column for The Sun, Clarkson wrote that he hated Meghan "on a cellular level" and said he was "dreaming of the day when [Meghan] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her".
The imagery was "humiliating and degrading towards the duchess", Ipso chairman Lord Faulks said. The watchdog found the newspaper had broken its editors' code of practice because the piece contained a "pejorative and prejudicial reference" to Meghan's sex. It rejected complaints that the piece was discriminatory on the grounds of race, inaccurate or sought to harass the duchess.
Clarkson later explained that he had been thinking of a scene in Game of Thrones, but wrote the column in a hurry and forgot to mention the TV show. "Oh dear. I've rather put my foot in it," he tweeted at the time. "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."
The Sun removed the article from its website and Clarkson asked for it to be taken down. In January 2023, he revealed he had emailed Harry and Meghan on Christmas morning 2022 to apologise: "I really am sorry. All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head." He added that even his own daughter, Emily, had taken to Instagram to denounce him: "I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle."
Prince Harry called the column "horrific, hurtful, and cruel towards my wife", saying it encouraged people "to go and think that it's acceptable to treat women that way". A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan said that while there had been an apology, "what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny."
Responding to the Ipso ruling, The Sun said it "accepts that with free expression comes responsibility" and published a summary of the findings on the same page the column usually appears, as well as on the front page of its website. The controversy reportedly cost Clarkson his relationship with Amazon, with Variety reporting the streaming giant would not work with him beyond already-commissioned seasons of The Grand Tour and Clarkson's Farm.