ITV stands by Jeremy Clarkson after Meghan article and says he will host Millionaire 'for the moment'

21 December 2022, 10:35

ITV will stand by Jeremy Clarkson and keep him as host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire "for the moment".

The former Top Gear host angered thousands of people over his controversial Meghan Markle column, in which he said he dreamed of her being stripped naked and having excrement thrown over her.

The article is the most complained about piece the independent press regulator Ipso has ever come across, outstripping all the complaints it received for every article last year.

There were calls for him to lose his job on the ITV quiz show.

But when asked if he will be kept on, the broadcaster's managing director Kevin Lygo replied: "Yes, at the moment, we are."

He added, while speaking during a Broadcasting Press Guild get-together in London on Tuesday: "I would say what he writes in a newspaper column... We have no control over what he says.

"We hire him as a consummate broadcaster of the most famous quiz on television, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Read more: Jeremy Clarkson's Meghan Markle column becomes most complained about article ever

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"So it's not quite in our wheelhouse but I don't know what he was thinking when he wrote that. It was awful."

Mr Clarkson asked for the column to be taken down from the Sun's website.

He had invoked a scene from the Game of Thrones fantasy series in which a hated character is forced to walk the streets of a city naked while people hurl things at her and a member of a religious order shouts "shame!" at her.

Mr Clarkson said on Monday: "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 piece was complained about more than 17,000 times, well over the 14,000 Ipso received across 2021.