ITV bosses have confirmed Jeremy Clarkson will not be fired over his heavily criticised comments about Meghan Markle.
An ITV executive said that Clarkson will keep his job as the host of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? following the backlash over his comments about the Duchess of Sussex in The Sun. The ex-Top Gear star has been at the centre of a media storm after writing in his newspaper column his desire to see Meghan "made to parade naked through the streets" while crowds "throw lumps of excrement at her".
More than 60 MPs have written to the editor of The Sun condemning the column "in the strongest terms", and Clarkson has since issued a statement on the issue. "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," he wrote on Twitter.
Speaking at a Broadcasting Press Guild event in London on Tuesday, Mr Lygo, managing director of ITV Studios, said: "I would say what he writes in a newspaper column... We have no control over what he says.
"We hire him as a consummate broadcaster of the most famous quiz on television, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? So it's not quite in our wheelhouse but I don't know what he was thinking when he wrote that. It was awful."
However, he went on to say that the controversial presenter would continue as the face of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? which he took over from original host Chris Tarrant in 2018.
"What [Clarkson] writes in a newspaper column is really more for [the press] to talk about than us,” continued Lygo. “We have no control over what he says and hire him as a consummate broadcaster of the most famous quiz on TV.”
Lygo played down any connection between Clarkson's behaviour and other recent ITV host controversies, such as Piers Morgan storming off Good Morning Britain.
“There are 30 presenters on ITV every day and occasionally one steps over the mark," he added. "Jeremy’s incident didn’t happen on ITV and Piers’s was two years ago – and he resigned amicably rather than being fired.
"We don’t want people ranting and raving and so forth but on live TV people, occasionally, slightly lose the plot."
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