Outspoken British broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson will keep his TV job despite criticising Prince Harry's wife Meghan Markle.
ITV director of television Kevin Lygo said Clarkson would continue presenting the top quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? after his latest column for tabloid newspaper The Sun, in which he condemned former actress the Duchess of Sussex for her attacks on the royal family in the couple's new Netflix series about themselves.
The piece caused controversy for a paragraph in which the former Top Gear presenter imagined Markle in a scene from fantasy series Game of Thrones, being paraded through the streets naked in disgrace while citizens hurl dung at her.
In comments on Tuesday at an event held by the Broadcasting Press Guild in London, the executive said he had "no control" over what Clarkson wrote for his column — although he described the article as "awful".
"We hire him as a consummate broadcaster of the most famous quiz on television, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" Lygo said. "So it's not quite in our wheelhouse but I don't know what he was thinking when he wrote that. It was awful."
The article has since been taken down from the newspaper's website at Clarkson's request and replaced with a tweet by him.
"Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it," Clarkson tweeted sarcastically on Monday. "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."
Conservative MP Caroline Nokes has written an open letter to The Sun, rejecting Clarkson's "not-an-apology". She repeated Markle's claims that Meghan received death threats and demanded "action be taken" against the presenter as well as an "unreserved apology" to the duchess.
The letter was signed by some 60 fellow MPs — the great majority of them ironically from the Labour Party and the separatist Scottish Nationalists.
Another outspoken broadcaster, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, was sacked from ITV's Good Morning Britain in March 2021 after accusing the Sussexes of lying in their gushing interview with Oprah Winfrey at their $15-million California mansion.