How one sickening column made Harry & Meghan’s point more powerfully than six hours of TV could.

Jeremy Clarkson hates Meghan Markle. 

He needs you to understand that he doesn't just hate her like he hates a bona fide serial killer, like Rose West, who kidnapped young women, locked them in her basement, abused, raped and then murdered them.

No, he hates her way more than that. 

He’d like to see her stripped and marched through the streets of London, please. He’d like her pelted with shit and yelled at. 'Shame!'' He’d have you yell. Shaaaaame.

NO Jeremy Clarkson. Not on any level, in any circumstance, is it ok to write this stuff about any woman & absolutely NO to "everyone who's my age thinks the same"
No no no. We absolutely do NOT think the same.
Listen to the noise Jeremy. The crowds are chanting "shame on YOU" pic.twitter.com/OzCt9lHG16

— Carol Vorderman (@carolvorders) December 18, 2022

That's the extract from a column that went around the world last night. 

The column also explained that Meghan clearly seduced Prince Harry away from his duty:

WE all know in our heart of hearts that Harold Markle is a slightly dim but fun-loving chin who flew Apache helicopter gunships in Afghanistan and cavorted around Las Vegas hotel rooms with naked hookers.

But then along came Meghan, who obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.

And now it seems that she has her arm so far up his bottom, she can use her fingers to alter his facial expressions.

Lovely.

After expressing his vivid Game Of Thrones-adjacent fantasy of Meghan Markle's naked, public humiliation, he went on to say: Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.

No, Jeremy. No they don't. Even if there are generational truths in how Harry and Meghan's disruption is viewed by different demographics, people "your age" do not fantasise about stripping her naked and marching her through the streets of London.

That sound you can hear is the collective chair-scrape as people stand up and change sides. No-one is sitting with you. 

Let's be clear, Jeremy Clarkson is an odious troll. An embodiment of exactly the kind of middle-aged, white, male dinosaur who really, really doesn’t like it when a woman has opinions. 

Or when anyone who doesn't look like him stands up for themselves. 

He thinks striking workers "should be taken outside and shot, executed in front of their families." He was ultimately fired by his bosses at the BBC for assaulting a producer and for gross slurs about everyone from Scotsmen to Muslims, Mexican and Asian people. The staff who loaded the captions when he hosted car show Top Gear once complained to management about having to deal with his words about women. "Comment after comment about blokeishness, wives and women were finally crowned in one recent edition with a misogynistic explanation 'in plain English' which saw three bikini-clad woman used to demonstrate the differences between Porsche models," they wrote. 

Clarkson's a right-wing anglophile who became famous driving cars quickly and eating food lustily and has, apparently, been shocked every time he’s lost a job for being provocatively offensive. Political correctness gone mad, it is, as he signs another meaty contract, and sits down to write another column. He’s being silenced, you see. 

But this week that troll was respectable enough to be at a Christmas lunch with Camilla, Queen Consort. Last Wednesday, the King's wife was the royal jewel in the festive tiara of a party hosted by Fortnum and Mason and also attended by Dame Judi Dench and... Piers Morgan, another prominent media critic of Meghan's.

The fact that “naughty boys” like Clarkson and Morgan are tolerated in such circles rather proves the point that Prince Harry was making over that six hours of television, doesn’t it?

He's been saying that the Palace is actually working in lockstep with the more sensational, abusive elements of the press, and that he and Meghan were the only ones prepared to rail against that toxic partnership. Christmas lunch, anyone?

And his other major point is also hard to argue with this week. Harry says that the media on the royal rota - which includes The Sun, where Clarkson's column was published - are working through an anti-Sussexes agenda. 

Clearly, no-one thought to edit this column for kindness. Clarkson is such banked-on clickbait that no editor at The Sun decided to remove, edit or change these words (or, more likely, they had all been instructed that they could not), about Meghan being stripped and abused, before they went to print. No. She’s annoying, isn’t she? No-one will mind. 

People mind. 

Women mind. 

Because women know that even if they feel Meghan and Harry are a bit too pleased with themselves these days, the way Clarkson speaks about Meghan is the way a lot of men would, if they could. Behind closed doors. Or at the bar. Or in Trump's infamous 'locker room'. 

However much women believe that family feuds should be played out in private Family group chats and passive-aggressively over a Christmas barbecue, we recognise that contempt, that hatred that keeps Jeremy Clarkson up at night is directed at all of us, really, if we just step out of line. 

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud, where we talk about Netflix's Harry & Meghan. Story continues below.

All these women with opinions are infuriating, after all. With their incessant complaining that the status quo isn't good enough, yet. These women with their “whining” about wanting to be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect. As if they were human beings. 

Meghan is not relatable to many of us, with her extraordinary beauty, her adoring, wealthy partner, her palatial home, her famous friends. All of that makes her a more comfortable target. 

But she is recognisable to us as a woman who put her head above the parapet and received all the fire more accurately directed at the man sitting beside her. 

She is undeniable as a lightening rod for culture wars that have almost nothing to do with her, personally. Brawls about race and privilege and about so-called 'resilience', which is often just code for stop screaming while I kick you. 

Clarkson also wrote in the same column that the documentary Harry & Meghan should have been called, A Woman, Talking Bollocks.

And women see these words, and we think. They really hate us, don't they? 

And while we're rearranging our seats away from Morgan, Clarkson and their outraged cronies, we also think: If that Meghan Markle is keeping Jeremy Clarkson up at night, she’s doing something right.