Punching down

I’ve done my best to defend Jeremy Clarkson. His excesses on Top Gear, which finally got him sacked, and his populist polemic in the Murdoch press certainly irked, but there was enough, I felt, to tolerate his excesses. Clarkson’s Farm was brilliant and persuaded many people that actually there was more to him that met the eye, but today he’s undone all that with his tawdry Sun column about Meghan Markle. Dripping with poison, it’s hard to forgive Clarkson for this one:

Let me say first that Clarkson can write. It’s not a coincidence that he’s been in demand for many years as a columnist and author. He is knowledgable and funny. This hateful piece is neither and he’s deservedly getting stick on social media.

As with most newspapers, The Sun is aimed mainly at older people. The fact that it employs the likes of Clarkson, Rod Liddle and Trevor Kavanagh is a good illustration of that. And just before Clarkson’s searing attack on Ms Markle, he makes a joke about Basil Brush. Now I remember Basil Brush, a moderately amusing glove puppet character, but that’s because I am old. Some young people may have heard of the character but I would suggest that kind of humour went out with the Ark. It’s old, dated and not funny. A bit like Jeremy Clarkson.

As a failed writer, I reckon I could get more views if I punched down, as Clarkson does. It’s far easier to put the boot into those who are vulnerable to attack than those who wield real power. This is the modus operandi of tabloid columnists. It is so much easier to find cheap gags to put someone down than it is to offer a defence, or to attack those with more power than you. And the reason Clarkson plumbs the depths of journalism is because it attracts readers. Not many in the grand scheme of things, but it reduces the enormous losses The Sun runs up. And don’t think this grotesque column somehow escaped those at the top. The paper’s sub-editors will have endorsed it for publication. It’s The Sun’s view, too, and that of its proprietor, the Dirty Digger, Rupert Murdoch.

I know little about Meghan Markle, other than the fact that she married Prince Harry. I know she was an actor but I never saw anything she was in. Anything that happens with the royal family is big news in the gutter press so I suppose it was inevitable that when they chose to go in a different direction from everyday royals, the vultures would circle. What’s happening now was inevitable. But how can you carry such hate around with you?

Clarkson says he hates Ms Markle in the same way as he hates Nicola Sturgeon and Rose West. Hate, need I remind you, is a very strong word. It takes a lot for me to hate anyone – Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Joey Barton, Rose West – but imagine hating the wife of a royal because she doesn’t behave like the rest of the royals? People say a lot of things about Harry and Meghan, that they’re oddballs and much, much worse. I have no idea. I don’t follow their lives through the media. The very idea of royal family is unhinged in my humble view, but H&M don’t seem any better or worse than any of the rest of them. But Clarkson picks out Ms Markle, hoping that one day she is made to parade naked through the streets while people throw shit at her. This isn’t normal, is it?

If only there was something about Ms Markle that set her apart from other members of the royal family, something that might explain why hard right media outfits and their so-called journalists are so obsessed with her. Snowflake in chief Piers Morgan leads the media hate crew. And Piers seems to have an unhealthy obsession with powerful black women. Maybe I’ve hit on something here. That’s it.

But this is about Clarkson and what is to me hateful, bullying writing. Cheap, nasty jokes, if you can call them that, at the expense of an easy target. I have no real view on Ms Markle, other than I find her to be a very attractive woman who is a good person, but gets grief because she is different and black.

I could conclude by saying that we deserve better journalism than this, but we don’t. We get the journalism we pay for. If we stop paying for it, things just might get better.