What good can possibly come of reacting to Jeremy Clarkson? It is his manifest purpose, his life’s work to rile the right-thinking, so that he can laugh at humourless libtards. It was all for this that he wrote in the Sun of his “cellular level” loathing for the Duchess of Sussex; trotted out a tired Game of Thrones cliche, fantasising about her being paraded naked down the street, while people hurled excrement at her; described her marital relationship as her hand in “her ginger glove puppet”.
He seemingly pinballed from one sexist, racist trope to another – the implication from his column being that Meghan is the manipulator, the voodoo priestess, the narcissist, the liar, the bewitcher, the polluter – for one purpose, which was to get people up in arms. Many public figures – from Carol Vorderman to Philip Pullman – took to social media to express their horror at these essentially violent fantasies.
Did Clarkson expect his own daughter to be among his opponents? Will her post on Instagram (“I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything my dad said about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those who are targeted with online abuse”) mar their family festivities? I doubt it. To the man who craves negative attention, there’s no such thing as a bad reaction. So here we all are, marching to his frenzied, aggressive drum, and no one enjoys the parade more than Clarkson himself. In an apology tweet, he wrote: “I’ve rather put my foot in it … I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.”
If this sounds like a call to ignore him so he’ll go away, it is not that. A piece like his, passing unremarked, leaves the discourse permanently worse. Just in practical terms, Harry and Meghan made the solid case on the Netflix documentary only a fortnight ago, that dog-whistle “joke” racist and misogynist abuse in the mainstream media both fuels and legitimises much more fervent and explicit abuse online.
I call their case “solid” not because I’m taking a partisan stance as part of the wokerati, but because it is so self-evident that every time a tabloid newspaper makes some opaque reference to Meghan’s “gangsta” upbringing, her “straight outta Compton” roots – all wildly inaccurate as descriptions of her background and just coded ways of asking, “What’s this woman of colour doing anywhere near our royal family?” – it has unleashed a tide of visceral disgust for Meghan on social media platforms. The dominant value system of the British rightwing press made her life unliveable in this country, in a concrete and demonstrable way. Now they castigate her for leaving.
Harry and Meghan, furthermore, have become the human targets of a set of bellicose but quite abstract assertions: take your equality, your cultural sensitivities, your respect, tolerance, humanity, take it all and shove it. It’s quite hard to get a critical mass behind sentiments like that; but if you can get some momentum behind the idea that Meghan is annoying, and from there to “enraging”, on to “loathsome”, concluding, as Clarkson did, wildly, “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way,” then you have yourself the makings of an anti-woke army.
He would have us believe that he’s merely returning to a freer, more honest time, when blokes could be blokes in the pages of newspapers, without the threat of “cancellation”. This is wrong – tolerance for the casual objectification of women and girls, misogynist tropes, both masked and perpetuated by a kind of Carry On playfulness, has dropped off a lot this century. But I can’t remember a time in red top memory where this kind of violent vindictiveness would have been published as an opinion anyone would be entitled to.
It doesn’t matter whether or not it makes sense; it doesn’t matter if, put on the spot, people struggle to describe what “woke” actually means. All that matters is that a hate figure has been created, a shortcut, a shibboleth, a means by which bigots can identify one another and give voice to their prejudice, without fear of censure.
It’s all so obvious, that’s what is galling: an obvious bid to sow division, to spur hatred, to justify misogynistic fantasies under the cover of a splenetic royalism, to dress up hate speech as fair comment. I miss the days when prejudice had to work harder to mask itself, but perhaps they made us complacent. Perhaps this ugly Jeremy Clarkson era will at least be galvanising.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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