Jeremy Clarkson will keep his job as host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? despite his “awful” comments about Meghan Markle, ITV has said.
ITV Studios boss Kevin Lygo has said the network plans to keep Clarkson in post “at the moment” amid the backlash to a column he wrote about the Duchess Of Sussex in The Sun at the weekend.
The former Top Gear host was met with a wave of criticism after describing how much he “hates” Meghan “on a cellular level” and dreams of the day “when she is made to parade naked through the streets” while crowds “throw lumps of excrement at her”.
Clarkson was heavily criticised by a number of public figures, including his own daughter, with the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) also receiving a record 17,500 complaints about his column.
Amid calls for ITV to drop him as host of Millionaire, Lygo was asked about Clarkson’s future at Broadcasting Press Guild event in London on Tuesday.
He said (via PA Media): “We hire him as a consummate broadcaster of the most famous quiz on television, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
“So it’s not quite in our wheelhouse but I don’t know what he was thinking when he wrote that. It was awful.”
Asked if ITV will keep Clarkson as host of the quiz show – a position he inherited from Chris Tarrant in 2018 – Lygo said: “Yes, at the moment we are.”
On Monday, the presenter said he was “horrified to have caused so much hurt” following the backlash and that he would “be more careful in future”, but stopped short of apologising.
Writing on Twitter, Clarkson wrote: “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.”
The column has since been removed from The Sun’s website at Clarkson’s request.