Meghan Markle: hateful women deserve to be hated 

Up against stiff competition, the broadcaster, Jeremy Clarkson, has spent the start of the week as public enemy number one, after his column in The Sun last Friday, which attacked Meghan Markle. Here is the essence of what he wrote:

Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her. Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.

More than 6,000 complaints have been made to the press regulator, IPSO (the independent press standards organisation), while Clarkson himself has faced a relentless barrage of social media abuse, alongside demands ranging from cancellation to jail time. The article itself has been pulled, While Clarkson has bowed to the mob and subsequently ‘apologised’ (rarely a good move):

Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. 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. 

Before we get to the nitty-gritty, I should like to declare an interest – or rather, a lack of one. I have almost no view on Jeremy Clarkson personally. Top Gear, for which he is most renowned, is a program I would pay not to watch, since my relationship with cars is on a par with Basil Fawlty. I have seen him in the odd, unrelated television clip however, and ‘he appears to be quite witty’ is as far as my opinion has developed.

Meghan Markle on the other hand, (and here I must agree with Clarkson), is a different story. I wish I were afforded the opportunity of not having an opinion on the woman, but for a privacy-demanding lady, she rarely extends the same courtesy to the public; infecting us with the minutiae of her life via every news source known to man. For reasons I shall expound later, I dislike her intensely. You must be the judge of how dispassionate I proceed.

First, let’s deal with Clarkson’s comments. His stock-in-trade appears to be that of a shock jock, and he certainly has form. In 2011, he wrote a column for The Sun in which he called for the Welsh language to be abolished. In reference to public sector workers going on strike, he said: ‘I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.’ And in more light-hearted mood: ‘Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill, and then run over him again for good measure.’ Nothing out of the ordinary so far then.

The next issue is Clarkson’s critics’ insistence that he was being serious. I seriously doubt that, and you might conclude the allusion to Game of Thrones and the hyperbolic comparison to Rose West gave the game away. But even if he were being serious, so what? Hate isn’t a crime (at least not yet), and there’s certainly plenty of it about; albeit it’s usually reserved for white men, conservatives, and populist politicians.

The problem appears to be that Clarkson has chosen a target off the recommended list; in particular, the fact that Meghan Markle is not only a woman, but also one of mixed-race heritage, somehow should afford her immunity from such ridicule. Many campaigners on the left who have long-since demanded ‘misogyny’ be criminalised, while others such as Dr Tessa Dunlop are demanding further restrictions to free speech. Meanwhile, the cogs of cancel culture are already in motion, with demands not only that Clarkson be sacked from ITV and Amazon, but there are also calls for jail time.

It is necessary to examine the turf we are playing on, in the interest of balance. Is there anything unique about Meghan attracting media mockery as a woman? The answer is no. All the royal ladies have come in for their fair share of crude insult, and indeed there was substantially less outrage when our beloved monarch’s death provided the opportunity for Uju Anya, an American professor to tweet the following non-joke:

‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’

Besides which, although women complain more about online abuse, it is actually conservative men who receive the most – whether that’s throwing acid on Nigel Farage, or wishing Boris Johnsondead. Of course, there are no consequences in such instances.

Let’s turn to the issue of race then. Many critics of Clarkson have tried to slur his words with the debatable point that Meghan is ‘black’. The trouble with this is that Meghan was initially welcomed with open arms by the British public. At the outset, Markle was one of the most popular royals, as was Prince Harry. Their favourability declined sharply in the wake of the Oprah interview, and has since plummeted further after the Netflix release. Meghan is currently on -64% approval much like her husband on -59%. As far as I am aware, Meghan was identifying as both a woman and a woman of colour when she first came to Britain.

The largest problem with the racism theory however, is that Meghan Markle is simply not black. Even by her own admission, she ‘feels too light in the black community’. In reality however, you’d be hard-pushed to pick her out in a Downton Abbey line-up. As with so many mixed-race celebrity multi-millionaires (Obama, Lewis Hamilton, Colin Kaepernick etc), the desire to identify as black rather than white, appears to stem from the irresistibility of the woke points and victim status you are accorded by default, rather than a genuine connection with the black community.

Seeing as there is nothing special about a woman being criticised, and that Meghan’s ‘blackness’ in unlikely to be a causal factor, why shouldn’t she be mocked? If those defending her are genuinely saying that women and / or non-whites should be awarded a special status, that needs to be said plainly, on the record. If not, you want equality – you’ve got it.

There is another plausible explanation however: Meghan is a hateful person. Clarkson may or may not genuinely hate Meghan Markle, but two-thirds of the British public certainly do, and that takes some doing. I’d put it down to this: first, Markle is a bad liar. We all lie, it’s essential currency – but we like good liars, those who cover their tracks. Meghan’s public record of contradictions and out-and-out falsehoods is so obvious it’s embarrassing. Second, she is clearly a bully. The odd incident here and there can be overlooked, but there are simply too many voices saying the same thing about her, and that’s not a good look.

Third, she openly dislikes England – and that is something the English tend to take to heart. Fourth, she has manipulated one of England’s favourite sons, Prince Harry, and turned him from a happy-go-lucky chap, to a handwringing wet liberal; banned from smoking, drinking, eating meat, hunting, and even caffeine. No wonder he looks so miserable. Fifth, she caused enormous distress to an aging monarch, and may even have contributed to her death by the ‘hurt’ and ‘exhaustion’ she inflicted on Queen Elisabeth II.

But more than anything, I believe Meghan is hated because of her appetite for betrayal. She has used her husband to garner fame, while betraying both the family and the nation that took her in. She has sold her soul to Netflix, and lied to feather her nest. Worst of all, she is one of the world’s most privileged multimillionaire narcissist megalomaniacs. Nothing wrong with that, sure. But masquerading as a victim? That’s a bit too strong.

We hate hateful men, without a second thought. Why shouldn’t hateful women be hated too?