Jeremy Clarkson’s Sun newspaper column, in which he said he “hated” the Duchess of Sussex, has become the most complained about article by the independent Press Standards Organisation, the regulator has said.
Ipso said the piece, which was pulled from the Sun’s website on Monday at Clarkson’s request, had received more than 17,500 complaints by 9am on Tuesday.
“We will follow our usual processes to examine the complaints we have received. This will take longer than usual due to the volume of complaints,” an Ipso spokesman told PA Media news agency.
The figure surpassed the total number of complaints the media regulator received in 2021, 14,355.
More than 60 cross-party MPs have written to Sun editor Victoria Newton to demand an apology and “action taken” against Clarkson over the column in which she said Meghan should be paraded down the streets naked.
In their letter, they said Meghan had received credible threats against her life and that columns like Clarkson’s contributed to an “unacceptable climate of hatred and violence”.
The letter, co-ordinated by the Tory chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes, was signed by Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP MPs, including the Tory chair of the Treasury select committee, Harriett Baldwin, Harriet Harman of Labor and Caroline Lucas of the Green party.
In an article published Friday in the wake of Prince Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary, Clarkson wrote that she hated Meghan “on a cellular level” compared to serial killer Rose West.
She said she was “dreaming of the day when she is paraded naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowd chants, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at him”.
The Sun has since removed the column at Clarkson’s request, but a statement from him promising to be more careful in future has been criticized for not including an apology.
In their letter, Nokes and the other MPs tell Newton that they “condemn in the strongest possible terms violent misogynistic language… This kind of language has no place in our country and it is unacceptable that it should be allowed to be published in a newspaper conventional”.
They add: “We cannot allow this type of behavior to go unchecked. We welcome the Sun’s retraction of the article and now demand that action be taken against Mr Clarkson and an unreserved apology to Ms Markle immediately.”
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Others who signed the letter included Labour’s Stella Creasy, Dawn Butler and Dan Jarvis, as well as former Tory cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom and Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper.
After widespread outcry over the weekend, Clarkson issued a statement on Monday, saying: “Oh dear. I’ve kind of put my foot down. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene from Game of Thrones and this has hurt a lot of people. I am horrified that I have caused so much harm and will be more careful in the future.”
But Nokes said it was “not an apology” and, tweeting the letter, said: “I welcome Jeremy Clarkson’s acknowledgment that he has caused hurt… but an editorial process allowed his column to be printed without question”.
Critics of the piece included Clarkson’s daughter Emily, who said: “I want to make it very clear that I am against everything my father wrote about Meghan Markle.”
It is unclear which of Ipso’s rules may have been broken due to its broad guidelines for comments. The regulator’s chairman, Edward Faulks, canceled plans to attend a private dinner with Rupert Murdoch on Monday night.