Jeremy Clarkson has addressed reports in the press about his future as host of the ITV game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.
Towards the end of last year, the ex-Top Gear host faced a widespread backlash over a column he penned in The Sun about Meghan Markle, in which he described how much he “hated” her on a “cellular level”.
Alluding to a scene from Game Of Thrones, he added within the piece that he “dreamed” of the day she’d be “made to parade naked through the streets” while crowds “throw lumps of excrement at her”
The Sun and Clarkson both apologised for the piece, which sparked a record-breaking number of complaints to the press regulator Ipso, who have since launched an investigation.
ITV boss Dame Carolyn McCall said shortly after the controversy: “I’d like to be clear that the comments made were Jeremy Clarkson’s own and are in no way endorsed by ITV. There is no place on ITV for the comments made in that article.”
She was asked about the matter again during an interview with Variety published on Wednesday, stating cryptically: “We’re contracted to this [upcoming series of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire], so we will do that. And then we have no future commitments, and we haven’t made any statements about that.”
While many media outlets interpreted this as a sign that Clarkson would not be returning to the ITV show, he put out a tweet on Wednesday evening insisting he had “not been sacked as host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”.
An ITV rep also stated (via Sky News): “As we have said for several weeks, ITV is contractually committed to a further series of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (which has now been recorded).
There are no further commissioning commitments beyond that currently as is typical with such shows where we make commissioning decisions on a series-by-series basis.
“Therefore for the avoidance of doubt neither Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? nor Jeremy Clarkson have been cancelled.”
Clarkson initially responded to the backlash in December 2022 with a Twitter post on Twitter that stopped short of an actual apology.
However, almost a month later, Clarkson did apologise publicly, and claimed he’d also emailed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex over Christmas to say sorry to them privately.
“Usually, I read what I’ve written to someone else before filing, but I was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry,” he claimed in a since-deleted Instagram post.
“So when I’d finished, I just pressed send. And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded.”
A statement issued by the couple’s spokesperson in response to Clarkson’s now-deleted Instagram post stated that he had only written to Prince Harry, and not to his wife.
Their representative said: “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.
“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.”