Jeremy Clarkson has said he has apologised to Harry and Meghan over his column in The Sun newspaper in which he said he "hated" the Duchess of Sussex.
In a statement on Monday, he said he emailed the couple on Christmas Day to say his language had been "disgraceful" and he was "profoundly sorry".
In the column, he wrote about a n*ked Meghan being pelted with excrement.
A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan said the article was not an isolated incident for Clarkson.
Clarkson had released a statement before Christmas saying he "was horrified to have caused so much hurt".
The Sun newspaper has also apologised for the December article
and removed it from its website.
In the column, Clarkson wrote
that he lay in bed "dreaming of the day when she [Meghan] is made to parade
n*ked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant
'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her".
He also claimed
"everyone who's my age thinks the same way", and that her appeal to young
people who "think she was a prisoner of Buckingham Palace" made him
"despair".
A record 25,000 complaints have been made to press
regulator Ipso since the piece was published.
In his lengthy
Instagram post on Monday, the presenter of Amazon Prime's The Grand Tour and
Clarkson's Farm and ITV's Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, said he usually
reads what he's written before filing his copy, but he was home alone that
day and in a hurry.
"So when I'd finished, I just pressed send.
And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded."
He
said he picked up a copy of The Sun and quickly realised he had "completely
messed up".
"You are sweaty and cold at the same time. And your
head pounds. And you feel sick. I couldn't believe what I was reading. Had I
really said that? It was horrible."
He said he had been thinking
of a scene in Games of Thrones when he wrote about imagining the duchess
being abused in the street, but had forgotten to mention it.
"So
it looked like I was actually calling for revolting violence to rain down on
Meghan's head."
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Duke and
Duchess of Sussex said Clarkson addressed his correspondence solely to
Prince Harry.
"While a new public apology has been issued today
by Mr Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of
writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories
and misogyny," the spokesperson said.
"Unless each of his other
pieces were also written 'in a hurry', as he states, it is clear that this
is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles
shared in hate," they added.
In a recent interview with ITV,
Prince Harry criticised Clarkson as well as the Royal Family for not
commenting on the matter at the time.
In his statement, Clarkson
added that he had "tried to explain" himself. "But still, there were calls
for me to be sacked and charged with a hate crime. More than 60 MPs demanded
action to be taken. ITV, who make Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and Amazon,
who make the Farm Show and the Grand Tour, were incandescent."
It
was then that he "wrote to everyone who works with me saying how sorry I
was" as well as emailing the duke and duchess.
"On Christmas
morning, I emailed Harry and Meghan in California to apologise to them too.
I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but that the
language I'd used in my column was disgraceful and that I was profoundly
sorry."
He also acknowledged that his own daughter Emily had been
among his critics.
Variety is reporting that Amazon Prime "is
likely to be parting ways" with Clarkson after 2024, when his shows that are
already in the pipeline are due to end. Amazon declined to comment.
Last
month, ITV's media and entertainment boss Kevin Lygo described Clarkson's
column as "awful" but said there were no plans "at the moment" to replace
him as host of game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
ITV is
believed to have one more series due to be filmed with Clarkson but no
further current commissioning commitments beyond that.
